THE POLITICS OF LUCK
Transcript of THE POLITICS OF LUCK
THE POLITICS OF LUCK
By
Daniel Schillinger
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Daniel Schillinger (2018)
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THE POLITICS OF LUCK
Daniel Schillinger
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
2018
Abstract
This dissertation considers the place of luck in political life through examination of the
political thought of Thucydides, Aristotle, and Machiavelli. I turn to these thinkers
because, in my view, they approach the idea of luck from a strongly skeptical,
deflationary, and psychological vantage point. By contrast, contemporary political
theorists and philosophers often reify the idea of luck as something “out there” in the
world—for example, in the literatures on “luck egalitarianism” and “moral luck.” These
contemporaries have turned to the idea of luck in order to gain leverage on issues of
governance, distributive justice, ethical responsibility, and political agency. However,
precisely because Thucydides, Aristotle, and Machiavelli offer more conceptually
nuanced and psychologically acute reflections on both the idea of luck itself and its role
in political life, they offer better resources for clarifying these perennial issues. In
particular, for these thinkers, the idea of luck is a piece of “folk wisdom” that arises only
because of the limitations of human agency: when agents prove incapable of foreseeing
and controlling significant events, then luck is invoked in order to describe what has
happened. Yet even if the idea of luck inheres in intellectual beliefs and psychological
orientations rather than in the warp and weft of reality itself, these attitudes still play
critical roles in political life. Ultimately, I construct a dialogue between Aristotle,
Thucydides, and Machiavelli regarding the virtues of both political leaders and ordinary
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citizens that constitute efficacious political agency in the face of contingency. Practical
wisdom (and, to a lesser extent, courage) comes to light as the key virtue at issue because
leaders and citizens call upon this virtue in particular when they respond to ostensible
good or bad luck.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A million thanks to my supervisor, Ryan Balot. Working with Ryan was an honor and a
pleasure. Anyone who knows Ryan’s work will see that I have tried to follow his
example. Clifford Orwin’s teaching and scholarship—especially his unforgettable
Thucydides seminar—stamped my time in Toronto from the beginning. Ronnie Beiner
was an extremely generous reader and interlocutor. Without his advice, the dissertation
would look very different. While Arlene Saxonhouse read the project in its final form, her
comments will shape its next iteration.
The Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto was (and
remains) full of interesting minds and good people. Thanks in particular to Ella Street,
David Polansky, Nate Gilmore, and Seth Jaffe for their conversation and friendship.
I first studied political philosophy under Larry Cooper at Carleton College, where
I also met (and briefly studied with) Joel Schlosser. At Ashland University, I'm trying to
carry forth their genuinely Socratic approach to teaching.
My deepest debt is to my parents, Lori and Peter, and to my sister, Hannah.
Finally, and since acknowledgments tend to be trite, I'll mention that my wife, Emily,
suggested that I dedicate this project on the topic of luck to “my blackjack dealer.”
Instead, I'll dedicate it to Emily—and to Wes, who was born in March 2017.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Luck, Politics, and Political Theory 1
Approaches to the Idea of Luck 10
Luck, Responsibility, and Justice 24
Political Agency in the Face of Contingency 33
Chapter 2
The Idea of Luck in Aristotle’s Thought 41
The Idea of Luck in Physics 2.4-6 46
Luck and Responsibility for Actions in NE 3.1 57
Luck, Statesmanship, and Legislation in the Politics 75
Chapter 3
Luck and Character in Machiavelli’s Political Thought 89
Luck and Character in The Prince 93
The Problem of Fortune Solved? Machiavelli’s Discourses 109
The Constancy of Machiavelli’s Marcus Furius Camillus 119
The Inconstancy of Machiavelli 125
Chapter 4
Deliberation and Daring: Thucydides on Luck and Democracy 130
The Idea of Luck in the History 134
Pericles on Deliberation, Daring, and Luck 139
Periclean Athens Exposed 152
The Spartan Objection 162
Luck, Agency, and Responsibility in Thucydides’ History 170
Conclusion
The Politics of Luck 180
Works Cited 185
1
CHAPTER 1: LUCK, POLITICS, AND POLITICAL THEORY
Introduction
First published in a 1948 issue of The New Yorker, Shirley Jackson’s story, “The
Lottery,” is both perfunctory and provocative.1 In the space of a few pages, a small
village, apparently American, selects by lot and stones to death one of its own citizens.
Jackson leaves ringing in the ears of the reader the protests of the unlucky victim: “‘It
isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”2 What
this story accomplishes, thematically, is contested. Judith Shklar notes that the piece was
written during the McCarthy era and could be read as parable of political persecution.3
What is beyond contestation, however, is the story’s association of luck and injustice.
The conceptual association of luck and injustice is ubiquitous in contemporary political
thought and practice. Liberals, conservatives, and mainstream political theorists agree on
this much: no one should be held responsible for what happens to him by luck;
consequently, distributive and retributive outcomes should be defined over and against
those determined by dumb luck.4
1 Jackson, “The Lottery,” 291-302.
2 Ibid., 302.
3 Shklar, “Injustice, Injury, and Inequality,” 30.
4 Influential political and economic thinkers on both the left and the right have attempted
to justify their approaches to issues of both moral responsibility and distributive justice in
light of a hard distinction between the ideas of choice and luck. Cf. Dworkin, Sovereign
Virtue, 444; Friedman, “Choice, Chance, and the Personal Distribution of Income,” 289-
2
Equally prominent right now is the argument that the state can and should
neutralize the effects of luck on the lives of individuals. For Richard Arneson and other
“luck egalitarians,” technologies of governance and administration can identify and
compensate individuals whose bad luck in the so-called social and natural lotteries
inhibits their life prospects.5 Luck egalitarians imagine a well-ordered democratic society
in which each individual fully controls his or her own destiny, precisely because through
compensating individuals for bad luck, everyone will (hypothetically) start in the same
90. At the same time, while it is commonplace to distinguish between choice and luck,
and while many people would agree that as a matter of justice the state should seek to
provide opportunities for choice and to protect the outcomes of choice, both political
theorists and ordinary citizens disagree about the extent to which luck on the one hand
and choice on the other are efficacious or determinative in the lives of ordinary people. In
a New York Times Op-Ed published in 2005, Matt Miller reports that he polled liberal and
conservative Americans on the question: “which matters most in determining where
people end up in life?” The poll provided just two possible responses to this question—
either luck or effort. Although Miller does not record the exact results, he writes that
“liberals or Democrats overwhelmingly said luck; most conservatives or Republicans said
individual effort.” Disagreements about these issues therefore track party affiliations.
Today there exist multiple American “politics of luck.” See Miller, “Taking Luck
Seriously”; and Taleb, Black Swan, 52.
5 Arneson, “Luck Egalitarianism—A Primer,” 43-44.
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place.6 Control, then, is a keynote of contemporary political discourse on luck: the state
controls luck so that citizens may control their own lives. In fact, as Ian Hacking has
shown in his seminal philosophical genealogy, The Taming of Chance, the contemporary
fascination with luck ultimately arises out of the aspiration to control it.7
In my view, both the conceptual association of luck with injustice and the
practical aspiration to tame chance are quixotic at best and misguided and self-defeating
at worst. Elizabeth Anderson has argued, persuasively, that a luck-egalitarian utopia
would actually fail to secure the relations of equality, liberty, and respect that have
always defined admirable democracies.8 By compensating some citizens for their putative
ugliness or stupidity on the grounds that these qualities are pieces of bad luck, the
democratic society imagined by the luck egalitarians could lead these citizens to believe
6 For early articulations of this approach to theorizing distributive justice, see Dworkin,
“What Is Equality? Part 1,” 185-246; Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2,” 283-345;
Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” 906-944; and Arneson, “Equality and
Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” 77-93.
7 Hacking, Taming of Chance, 10: “I write of the taming of chance, that is, of the way in
which apparently chance or irregular events have been brought under the control of
natural or social law. The world became not more chancy, but far less so.” See also
Hacking, Emergence of Probability; Strauss, City and Man, 15.
8 Anderson offers the classic statement on the ascendancy of luck as nemesis in post-
Rawlsian, egalitarian political theory. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?,” 287-
337.
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that they are less worthy and less capable than their peers, at once undermining their self-
respect and sapping their energy for citizenship.9 Such a democracy would thereby
realize Tocqueville’s worst fears regarding “administrative centralization” and “soft
despotism.”10 Equally important, the excessive rationalization and bureaucratization of
political life could increase the effects of contingency or capriciousness on the lives of
individuals. When one’s opportunities for employment, if not happiness, are determined
by instruments so impersonal and blunt as bureaucratic rules and market forces, then
unforeseeable and ironical discontinuities between actions and outcomes are
inescapable.11
9 On what Anderson calls “the problem of paternalism,” see especially “What Is the
Point,” 305: “to require citizens to display evidence of personal inferiority to get aid from
the state is to reduce them to groveling for support.” Frequently, and unwittingly, the luck
egalitarians endorse paternalistic policies (and hence inequality) precisely because they
aim to neutralize the effects of luck on the lives of citizens. On the need for maintaining
relations of equal respect in the welfare state, consider the reflections of Ignatieff, The
Needs of Strangers. But fundamentally, the problem is that “the idea of neutralizing bad
or good luck provides no independent reason to favor equality as the principle of
distribution.” See Hurley, “Luck and Equality,” 59.
10 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 88-89, 646-673.
11 For example, Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” esp. 4-5; and the commentary of Beiner,
Political Philosophy, xliii-lv. See also, Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.
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On a more philosophical plane, moreover, these contemporary approaches to luck
and politics depend upon an inadequate account of luck itself. When luck egalitarians
refer to “brute luck” (in contradistinction to “option luck”), they have in mind
unforeseeable, uncontrollable events that simply happen to agents no matter what they
know or do.12 For the luck egalitarians, and (as we will see) for many scholars who write
on the topic of luck across the disciplines, luck is somehow “out there” in the world. In
Ronald Dworkin’s memorable example, bad luck strikes like “a falling meteorite,” that is,
in the manner of an utterly unpredictable and irresistible external force.13
I elaborate an alternative approach to the topic of luck by turning to the history of
political thought—in particular, to the writings of Thucydides, Aristotle, and Machiavelli.
For these thinkers, the idea of luck is not “out there” in the world. Instead, luck is an
epistemic phenomenon, and the idea of luck refers to an explanation or a description of
action rather than to a cause of motion or change in its own right. Thus the reflections on
12 On the distinction between “brute luck” and “option luck,” see especially Vallentine,
“Brute Luck, Option Luck,” 529-557. But Hurley notes that this distinction is misleading
insofar as option luck does not truly count as a type of luck for many luck egalitarians.
Option luck instead refers to a gamble or a calculated risk that backfired and for which
the agent remains fully responsible. The luck egalitarian position is that distributive
justice requires correcting all distributive outcomes that are caused by luck in
contradistinction to human action, full stop. See Hurley, “Luck and Equality,” 51 n.1.
13 Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2,” 293.
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luck found in the writings of Thucydides, Aristotle, and Machiavelli have a strongly
skeptical, deflationary, and psychological bent.
This shared approach to the topic of luck has multiple implications for thinking
about politics. For example, as I will argue in my interpretation of Aristotle’s thought,
because luck is not “out there” in the world, it is incumbent upon political leaders and
citizens to grasp the true political causalities that lie beneath the appearance of either
good or bad luck. Moreover, even if the idea of luck inheres in intellectual beliefs and
psychological orientations rather than in the warp and weft of reality itself, these attitudes
still play critical roles in political life, as the chapters on both Machiavelli and
Thucydides will make clear. Perceptions of good or bad luck frequently elicit emotions,
such as hope and fear, which have the power by themselves to change the minds of
citizens deliberating in the assembly or fighting on the battlefield. Indeed, political
leaders often grasp this fact, and they use the rhetoric of luck to manage the emotions of
ordinary people, for better or worse. Recognizing that luck is a piece of “folk wisdom”
can help us to appreciate these Machiavellian dynamics in our own political life.
Yet, even as my chosen authors suggest that the idea of luck is a piece of folk
wisdom, they also maintain, each in his own way, that this piece of folk wisdom contains
significant wisdom indeed. For example, we will see that Aristotle uses the common-
sense idea of luck to show that the responsibilities of political leaders extend beyond their
capacities fully to foresee and to control the circumstances or the effects of their deeds.
We will also see that, for Machiavelli, the character of the virtuous prince is shaped,
paradoxically, by the experience of extreme bad luck. Finally, by attending to
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Thucydides’ History, we will see that Periclean-Athenian civic discourses on the idea of
bad luck may have helped the Athenians “to go on together” in the face of disaster.14
Thus I turn to the history of political thought not simply because I seek to
elaborate a deflationary account of luck that calls into question the philosophical
assumptions that lie at the core of contemporary luck egalitarianism. In fact, much of this
critical work has already been accomplished: Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and
other theorists of “moral luck” have offered honest, even brutally pessimistic accounts of
the place of luck in our ethical lives.15 While my debt to Williams’ thought on the issues
of luck and ethical responsibility will soon become clear, I go beyond Williams, because
14 I borrow this language from Ober, Athenian Legacies, 3.
15 The key text is Williams’s original article, “Moral Luck,” esp. 125-26: “One’s history
as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and
held up and partly formed by things that are not, in such a way that reflection can only go
in one of two directions: either in the direction of saying that responsible agency is a
fairly superficial concept, which has limited use in harmonizing what happens, or else
that it is not a superficial concept, but that it ultimately cannot be purified—if one
attaches importance to the sense of what one is in terms of what one has done and what in
the world one is responsible for, one must accept much that makes its claim on that sense
solely in virtue of its being actual.” See also Williams, Shame and Necessity, 163-64;
Williams, Moral Luck, 10; Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 146; and Nussbaum, Fragility of
Goodness, especially the summary of her interpretation of Aristotle on 380-81.
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his work remains both apolitical and entangled in the Kantian categories that he so
acutely criticized.16
In particular, by constructing a dialogue among Aristotle, Machiavelli, and
Thucydides, I aim to theorize virtues that could empower both political leaders and
ordinary citizens to think and to act well amid events that would appear to many people
to be extremely lucky or unlucky. Practical wisdom (and, to a lesser extent, courage)
comes to light as the key virtue at issue, because leaders and citizens call upon this virtue
in particular when they respond to ostensible good or bad luck. As Aristotle puts the
point, “someone who is truly good and sensible bears up under all kinds of luck (pasas
tas tuchas) in a becoming way and always does what is noblest given the circumstances,
just as a good general makes use, with the greatest military skill, of the army he has” (NE
1.10.1100b37-1101a4).17 Like the general, the pilot, or any other expert craftsman, the
16 I explain this point at greater length below. See also Pippin, “Williams on Nietzsche
and the Greeks,” 166-74.
17 Unless otherwise noted, translations of the Nicomachean Ethics refer to Bartlett and
Collins, trans., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. My own translations and transliterations
refer to the Greek edition of Bywater, Ethica Nicomachea. Translations of Aristotle’s
Politics refer to Lord, trans., Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd ed., unless otherwise noted. My own
translations and transliterations refer to Newman, ed., The Politics of Aristotle. Finally,
translations of the Physics usually refer to Apostle, trans., Aristotle’s Physics, or to the
Greek of the Oxford text, edited and revised by Ross. All references to Aristotle are
inlaid in the text. Other works and commentaries are cited and discussed in Chapter 2.
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person of practical wisdom (phronimos) locates an “opportune” (kairos) course of action
even and especially in unlucky circumstances (NE 2.2.1104a9-10).
At the same time, each thinker offers his own distinctive conceptualization of
practical wisdom and its responsiveness to the appearance of good or bad luck.
Ultimately, I use Thucydides’ critical account of deliberative rationality (gnōmē) in
democratic Athens to explore, if not to answer, the Machiavellian question: how can
citizens eschew intoxication or insolence in good luck and abjectness in bad luck (see D
3.31)?18 Alternatively put, Pericles says in the last line of his final speech: “The most
powerful cities and individuals are the ones who, with respect to misfortune, least lose
their minds and most stand their ground” (2.64.6).19 The question is whether and how a
18 I cite The Prince and the Discourses on Livy according to the standard fashion (by
work, book, chapter, and paragraph), and I inlay references in the text. I follow the
Mansfield translation of The Prince and the Mansfield-Tarcov translation of the
Discourses. Other editions of these texts in addition to Machiavelli’s minor works are
cited and discussed in Chapter 3.
19 My translation. References to Thucydides are inlaid in the text and refer to the text by
book, chapter, and line numbers as appropriate. My own translations and transliterations
refer to the Oxford Classical Text, edited by Jones and revised by Powell. Wherever
possible, I use the translation of Woodruff, Thucydides on Justice, Power, and Human
Nature. Because Woodruff has only translated selections of the History, I frequently rely
instead on the recent translation of Mynott, trans., Thucydides: The War of the
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democracy could fulfill (or suitably modify) this Periclean promise. The development of
my argument toward an answer to this question is thematic rather than chronological. I
move from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Thucydides, and hence from the prudential
responses of political leaders to ostensible good or bad luck in Aristotle’s thought, to the
responses to luck of both leaders and the people in Machiavelli, to the responses to luck
of the full-fledged Athenian democracy in the age of Pericles in Thucydides.
Approaches to the Idea of Luck
During the twentieth century, “chance, which was once the superstition of the vulgar,
became the centrepiece of natural and social science, or so genteel or rational people are
led to believe.”20 Thus Ian Hacking frames the intellectual preoccupation with luck in our
time. While we have seen that some political theorists,21 economists,22 statisticians,23 and
“pop” essayists,24 write about the best ways to neutralize luck or to make one’s own luck,
Peloponnesians and the Athenians, and I modify this translation as necessary. Additional
translations and commentaries are cited and discussed in Chapter 4.
20 Hacking, Taming of Chance, 10.
21 For example, Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 1,” 185-246; Dworkin, “What Is
Equality? Part 2,” 283-345.
22 Friedman, “Choice, Chance, and the Personal Distribution of Income,” 289-90.
23 See, for example, the various responses to Taleb’s Black Swan published in the
American Statistician, especially Lund, “Revenge of the White Swan,” 189-92.
24 Wiseman, Luck Factor.
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others who write in these same disciplines or genres25 (not to mention political
scientists,26 philosophers,27 sociologists,28 classicists,29 cultural anthropologists,30 and
novelists31), have rehabilitated what Hacking calls “the superstition of the vulgar”—that
is, the idea of luck as something mysterious, uncontrollable, and irregular. Hacking
25 For example, among political theorists, consider the following line from Arendt, “What
Is Authority?,” 137: “Virtù is the response, summoned up by man, to the world, or rather
to the constellation of fortuna in which the world opens up, presents and offers itself to
him, to his virtù. There is no virtù without fortuna and no fortuna without virtù.” Among
statisticians and essayists, see Taleb, Black Swan. The non-academic author who has
most influenced my own approach to the idea of luck is Didion. See Year of Magical
Thinking, 172-74.
26 For example, Shapiro and Bedi, eds., Political Contingency.
27 Williams’s work on moral luck has spawned a whole philosophical literature on the
topic. See, for example, Statman, ed., Moral Luck; and Athanassoulis, Fortune’s Web.
28 For example, Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility,” 1-10.
29 For example, Eidinow, Luck, Fate, and Fortune; Wohl, ed., Probabilities,
Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals.
30 For example, Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture.
31 McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 153; Smith, White Teeth, 347: “Of course, he understood
the work he did involved some element of moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You
work partly in the dark, uncertain of future ramifications, unsure what blackness your
name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your door.”
12
himself adopts this approach: “But how can chance ever be tamed? Parallel to the taming
of chance . . . there arose a self-conscious conception of pure irregularity, of something
wilder than the kinds of chance that had been excluded by the Age of Reason.”32 But
before it is possible to decide whether luck can be tamed, it is necessary to say exactly
what it is.
As a starting point, consider that the scholarly literature on the idea of luck is
replete with figures, metaphors, and thought experiments.33 Perhaps it is no accident that
the idea of luck has its own iconography—from the bona dea to the wheel of fortune to
32 Hacking, Taming of Chance, 10.
33 Rescher’s Brilliant Randomness is a compendium of such illustrations; see especially
the chapter titled “The Different Faces of Luck,” 70-86. The original articles on moral
luck written by Williams and Nagel center on various thought experiments and literary or
historical episodes: the child who wanders into the oncoming taxi; the possible
counterfactual outcomes of Anna Karenina’s affair with Vronsky; the possible
counterfactual outcomes of Gauguin’s decision to abandon his family, to move to the
Haiti, and to attempt to become a famous painter; the bird that flies into the path of the
bullet; the decision of Chamberlain to sign the Munich agreement; the counterfactual
possibility that a Nazi might have been born in South America rather than in Germany.
See Williams, “Moral Luck,” 117-24; Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 137-46. There is nothing
wrong with thought experiments in and of themselves, but the bewildering number and
variety of them adduced by Williams and Nagel gives one the impression that the central
concept—luck itself—remains obscure for the authors.
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the black cat.34 The haziness of the idea may invite these reifications. Even those
philosophers who have made a special study of luck offer conflicting definitions of the
term. For Williams, as for Alasdair MacIntyre, luck refers to what is unpredictable;35 for
Hacking, to what is highly improbable, or even random;36 for Nussbaum and Thomas
Nagel, to what is uncontrollable;37 for Dworkin, to what is both uncontrollable and
34 See Rescher, Brilliant Randomness, 8-12. On the classical iconography of luck (tuchē)
and fate (moira), see Eidinow, Luck, Fate, and Fortune, passim. On the Renaissance
iconography of fortune or luck (fortuna), see Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 140-44;
Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 120.
35 Williams, “Moral Luck, 128. Williams features examples of moral luck in which
agents regret what they do even though they deliberated well, or in which they
deliberated poorly but still accept the results of their actions. For Williams, luck seems to
refer to outcomes of human action that could not have been foreseen. Similarly,
MacIntyre finds “four systematic sources of unpredictability in human affairs” (90):
“radical conceptual innovation” (90); “the unpredictability of my future by me” (96); “the
indefinite reflexivity of game theoretic situations” (97); “trivial contingencies can
powerfully influence the outcome of great events” (100).
36 Hacking, Taming of Chance, 10.
37 Nussbam, Fragility of Goodness, 3-4. On the next page, I analyze Nussbaum’s
conceptualization of luck. Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 138: “Prior to reflection, it is intuitively
plausible that people cannot be morally assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is
due to factors beyond their control.” As Nagel’s initial formulation of the idea of moral
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unintentional;38 for Richard Rorty, to what is contingent.39 There is little agreement,
moreover, about the appropriate conceptual terminology: while some scholars refer
exclusively to “luck,” others prefer “chance,” “fortune,” or “contingency.” Surveying
these various areas of confusion, a skeptic might wonder whether luck refers to a unitary
concept, or whether these different overtones should be distinguished via a more
differential terminology.
The question of luck’s definition has not been given its due. For all their
differences, Nussbaum, MacIntyre, Dworkin, and others write about luck as if the term
referred to a clearly defined and observable phenomenon out in the world. Reading their
studies of luck, one gets the impression that human experience can be divided into two
fields: on the one hand, there is the field of human agency, in which human beings
exercise significant control over their actions through deliberation; on the other hand,
there is the field of luck, in which events befall human beings no matter what they know
or do.40 For example, Nussbaum writes: “what happens to a person by luck will be just
luck, this line clearly identifies luck as what is uncontrollable. See also Barry, “Is It
Better to Be Powerful or Lucky? Part 1,” 184.
38 Cf. Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2,” 293; Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 444.
39 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 31, 51, 60.
40 As we will see, the “two-fields” view of luck is also an important interpretative lens
through which scholars (mis)interpret Aristotle and Thucydides. For example, Cornford
writes of Thucydides’ History: “two factors—gnōmē, human foresight, purpose, motive,
and Tuchē, unforeseen non-human agencies—divide the field between them. . . . One
15
what does not happen to a person through his or her own agency, what just happens to
him, as opposed to what he does or makes.”41 The Fragility of Goodness goes on to
elaborate the various ways in which luck impedes doing or making, for human beings
everywhere and always. Nussbaum does not explain, however, why she assumes that luck
refers to some deep feature of reality itself. Is it not possible that the appearance of luck
reflects our own limitations as agents?
speaker after another in the History dwells on the contrast between a man’s own gnōmē
over which he has complete control, and Fortune over which he has no control at all.”
Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, 105.
41 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 3. In fact, though, Nussbaum’s view of luck is even
more expansive than this line implies; indeed, it is expansive to the point of incoherence.
Nussbaum goes on to say in the very next line that “to eliminate luck from human life
will be to put that life, or the most important things within it, under the control of the
agent (or of those elements in him with which he identifies himself), removing the
element of reliance upon the external and undependable.” In the first line (quoted in the
body of the chapter), Nussbaum seems to say that luck refers to one kind of external
happening as opposed to human doing and making. This second line, though, uses the
idea of luck to refer to the totality of phenomena outside human agency. But certainly
many things come to be neither through human action nor through luck. I engage in a
critical dialogue with Nussbaum throughout the dissertation. Although there are multiple
problems with her argument, including its overly sentimental depiction of human
passivity, the most fundamental problem is that luck for her is everything and nothing.
16
Indeed, in my view, the idea of luck arises only because of the limitations of
human agency: when actors prove incapable of foreseeing and controlling significant
events, then luck is invoked in order to describe what has happened. Each of my chosen
thinkers approaches luck as an epistemic phenomenon rather than as a constitutive
principle of the world. That Machiavelli takes a demystifying stance toward luck is well-
known.42 In Chapter 25 of The Prince, for example, Machiavelli attacks the idea that
fortune is itself an independent force. Borrowing from the Quattrocento humanist Leon
Battista Alberti, Machiavelli compares fortuna “to one of those violent rivers which,
when they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and buildings, lift earth from
42 For example, Newell, “How Original Is Machiavelli?,” 612-34. Newell persuasively
argues that Machiavelli’s skeptical and deflationary stance toward luck distinguishes him
from his Quattrocento humanist predecessors. Newell also shows that Skinner incorrectly
attributes this distinctively Machiavellian perspective on fortuna to Renaissance
humanism as an intellectual tradition. Even so, Newell does not object to Skinner’s
account of Machiavelli’s own views on fortuna. See Skinner, Foundations of Modern
Political Thought, 156. See also Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 190; Strauss, Thoughts
on Machiavelli, 222-53. Of course, others have argued—unpersuasively in my view—
that Machiavelli deferred to the power of fortuna as an external force. See Parel,
Machiavellian Cosmos; and Viroli, Machiavelli, 21-24. At the same time, and as we will
see, the fact that Machiavelli doubts the power of fortuna to bring about change by itself
is perfectly compatible with the view that luck looms large in political life.
17
this part, drop in another. . .” (P 25).43 For Alberti, men survive fortuna’s flood by
swimming in the direction of the current or, better yet, by climbing into boats provided
by God to the virtuous.44 Machiavelli offers a contrasting perspective:
it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for [flooding
rivers] with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a
canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging. It happens
similarly with fortune, which demonstrates her power where virtue has not
been put in order to resist her and therefore turns her impetus where she
knows that dams and dikes have not been made to contain her. (P 25)
For Machiavelli, fortune represents the ambiguous relation of nature to human
happiness prior to the emancipation of efficacious human power over and against nature.
Although the flooding of the river might appear to be bad luck, Machiavelli urges the
reader to see it as a natural and necessary event that admits of prediction and control to a
great extent. By implication, then, luck is an epistemic phenomenon. Indeed, in Chapter
25 of The Prince, the appearance of luck might seem to be epiphenomenal to human
agency altogether. As Claude Lefort puts the point, “if we judge Fortune to be sovereign,
it holds us in fact beneath its power, and we are dispossessed of our freedom; if we rely
on our own strength, it diminishes, and the area of our freedom and knowledge
43 Both Pitkin and Newell have persuasively established the link between the occurrence
of this image in Alberti and Machiavelli. See Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 143; Newell,
Tyranny, 290-91.
44 Alberti, “Three Dialogues,” 35-38.
18
increases.”45 Thus luck remains a moving target, since the appearance of either good or
bad luck seems to vary with the capacities of agents to foresee and to control both
external circumstances and their own characters.
Less familiar than this reading of Machiavelli on fortuna is the fact that Aristotle
offers a similarly skeptical and deflationary account of the idea of luck. For many
scholars of Aristotle, Aristotle uses the idea of luck to refer to a cause of motion or
change on par with those of both nature and deliberate human action. For example,
Nussbaum uses the phrase “external happening” to pick out instances of good or bad luck
throughout her interpretation of Aristotle’s thought in The Fragility of Goodness.46
Likewise, in Jill Frank’s treatment of the ideas of luck, necessity, and agency in
Aristotle’s political thought, she writes that “what happens by accident is independent of
human agency.”47 And Cynthia Freeland concludes from her reading of Aristotle’s
Physics that luck is an “objective feature of reality.”48
As I interpret Physics 2.4-6 in Chapter 2, however, the idea of luck refers to a
description of action rather than to a cause of it. In particular, we will see that, on the
Aristotelian account, the idea of luck (tuchē) refers to a description of an ostensibly
unpredictable and uncontrollable outcome that also appears to have a striking influence
45 Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, 195.
46 For example, Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 10, 317, 332.
47 Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 40. Frank follows Frede, “Necessity, Chance, and
‘What Happens for the Most Part,’” 197-220.
48 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 70.
19
on human flourishing (Phys 2.5.197a26-27). In this way Aristotle hives off the more
human-focused concept of “luck” from impersonal chance (automaton), with which he
identifies unpredictable, uncontrollable outcomes in nature—the proverbial tree falling in
the forest, for example (Phys. 197a36-197b20). According to Aristotle, moreover, the
idea of luck is a type of “contingent explanation” (aitia kata sumbebēkos) as opposed to
an “intrinsic explanation” (aition kath’ hauto; Phys. 2.5.197a1-10). In my view, which I
will explain in Chapter 2, the idea of luck is itself contingent because the unpredictable
outcomes that strike us as lucky or unlucky elicit an indefinite range of explanations that
reflect our own interests, emotions, or background knowledge. In calling these
explanations contingent, Aristotle draws on his more general notion of contingency (to
kata sumbebēkos)—the conjunction of one or more elements or events in an unusual way
that is not self-explanatory and could have been otherwise (see Phys. 2.2.193b27-28).
Aristotle’s nuanced conceptual vocabulary therefore provides a useful first cut at the
ideas of luck, chance, and contingency, and it can shed light on the less self-conscious
usages of these ideas today.49 When I use these words throughout the dissertation, I have
in mind their Aristotelian definitions, at least as starting points.
Aristotle’s account of tuchē is also useful, I will argue, because it brings to light
the twofold significance of luck understood as a piece of folk wisdom. On the one hand,
49 For example, many people view luck and chance as distinct causal agents. Friedland,
shows, persuasively, that it is common to view luck as (potentially) a good thing that
attaches to particular people (for example, a gambler). Chance, by contrast, is often held
to be simply uncontrollable. See Friedland, “On Luck and Chance,” 267-82.
20
Aristotle’s definition of luck as a contingent explanation preserves and illuminates the
common-sense usage of luck. Human beings invoke the idea of luck when the outcomes
of their actions appear to have come about irrespective of their own deliberations,
especially when these outcomes either satisfy or thwart their choices in ways both
spectacular and uncontrollable (Phys. 2.5.197a5-6). On the other hand, Aristotle follows
pre-Socratic philosophers such as Democritus and Empedocles by arguing that luck does
not count as a cause in its own right—that luck itself causes nothing (Phys. 2.5.197a10-
12). In Chapter 2, then, I will suggest that Aristotle offers a kind of “phenomenology” of
luck, even as he defends the philosophic view that the motions of human beings and of
the natural world admit of determinate explanations in every case.
Furthermore, while Aristotle uses the idea of luck to refer to an imprecise and
even chaotic set of phenomena, his conceptual vocabulary still clarifies the kinds of
outcomes that we routinely call lucky or unlucky. Note that Aristotle uses the idea of luck
to refer to outcomes that are both strikingly unpredictable and uncontrollable. This
definition improves upon existing philosophical accounts; as we have seen, many of these
accounts identify either unpredictability or uncontrollability as luck’s single defining
feature. For example, Williams argues that it is a matter of luck whether a hypothetical
Gauguin realizes his dream of becoming a famous painter, precisely because the result of
the project is unpredictable.50 In response, an Aristotelian would point out that the
outcome of Gauguin’s project depends, to a great extent, on actions that he controls
through his deliberations and daily activities. Whether Gauguin becomes a famous
50 Williams, Moral Luck, 117-127.
21
painter may be unpredictable, but it is hardly uncontrollable, and it therefore cannot be
considered a matter of luck alone.51 Conversely, whereas Nussbaum, Nagel, and others
define luck as what is uncontrollable, it would be strange to say that all uncontrollable
events happen by luck: neither tomorrow’s sunrise nor one’s inevitable death are lucky or
unlucky, because they are both perfectly predictable. Thus the criteria of unpredictability
and uncontrollability together define luck better than either criterion on its own.
Yet Aristotle’s approach to the idea of luck leaves at least one important question
unanswered. How do human beings come to identify certain events (but not others) as
strikingly unpredictable and uncontrollable and hence as instances of good or bad luck?
With this question in mind, Dean Hammer has written that “we can understand luck
definitionally as an unanticipated occurrence, but that does not get us very far. . . . My
suggestion is that we can better understand chance as a cultural construction. Which
events we pay attention to and the meaning we assign to those occurrences are
51 Indeed, what would Gauguin think in retrospect? Surely not that his success was just
lucky. Although he could argue that it was (once) unpredictable, because he does not
regret the outcome of his action, Aristotle would say that Gaugin is responsible for it. See
NE 3.1.1110b18-20 and my reflections on regret, voluntariness, and responsibility in
Chapter 2. Also recall the “four systematic sources of unpredictability in human affairs”
laid out by MacIntyre; my Aristotelian criticism of Williams applies to MacIntyre as
well. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 90-100.
22
determined by the culture in which we live.”52 Attending to the role of luck in
Thucydides’ History supports Hammer’s cultural approach to luck even as it suggests a
refinement of it.53 For Thucydides, the idea of luck inheres in intellectual beliefs and
psychological orientations that are fundamentally shaped by the regime. Through his
depiction of the Athenian and Spartan regimes at war, Thucydides illuminates the
contrasting civic discourses that inform his characters’ conceptions and perceptions of
good and bad luck.54 But for Thucydides himself, luck is not out there in the world. As
52 Hammer, “The Cultural Construction of Chance in the Iliad,” 126. Hammer takes
inspiration from Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture. For a likeminded analysis of
“cultural models” of tuchē and moira in the classical Greek context, see Eidinow, Luck,
Fate, and Fortune, 9.
53 Hammer’s focus on the cultural significance of luck, as opposed to its political
significance, may be suited to the Iliad insofar as that text antedates the advent of politics
strictly speaking.
54 I follow Orwin in supposing that “Thucydides shows us the self-revelation of the cities
of Athens and Sparta . . . the significance of the war lies above all in this process of self-
revelation.” Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 193; see also 10-11. That the Athenian and
Spartan regimes each possess characteristic discourses on the idea of luck has been
argued, persuasively, by Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 3, 89-90, and passim. But
cf. Zumbrunnen, who explores the dissonances and variations within Athenian and
Spartan outlooks, in addition to the ways in which actions redound upon and reshape the
characters of these two cities. Zumbrunnen, Silence and Democracy, 73-94. The fact that
23
Geoffrey Hawthorn has remarked, and as we will see for ourselves, “it is not he but his
characters who speak of tuchē.”55
Like Machiavelli and Aristotle, then, Thucydides views luck as an epistemic
phenomenon. Yet, for all that, and precisely because of its psychological significance,
luck plays a critical role in the evolution of the war. Whereas Aristotle offers a
“phenomenological” account of luck, Thucydides’ approach to luck is “political-
phenomenological.” However, commentators on Thucydides from Adam Parry to
Williams have missed this point; and in Thucydides’ profound dramatizations of
perceptions of good and bad luck in political life they have discovered only the banality
that rationality is, in the words of Williams, “at risk to chance.”56 These Thucydidean
the Sicilian expedition came to ruin under the leadership of Nicias, whose perspective on
tuchē resembles that of Archidamus as much it resembles that of Pericles, proves the
importance of eschewing a monolithic picture of Athens in particular. On this point, see
Connor, Thucydides, 41. I will try to be sensitive to the tensions and ambiguities within
Athenian perspectives on luck in Chapter 4.
55 Hawthorn, Thucydides on Politics, 235.
56 Although the line is enigmatic, Williams appears to make the trite point that events
such as the plague can disrupt the best-laid plans and end lives. Williams, Shame and
Necessity, 163-64. Even before Williams, Parry had argued in his influential dissertation
that tuchē refers in the History to the most “incalculable” aspect of “external reality.”
Parry, Logos and Ergon in Thucydides, 181-82, 186, 192.
24
scholars join the Aristotelian scholars mentioned above in presenting bad luck as a
compulsory external force that crushes human agency altogether.
In fact, however, Thucydides’ deflationary and regime-focused approach to the
idea of luck can help us to pose more sharply the central questions about luck and
responsibility that preoccupied Williams himself. If luck is not in fact out there in the
world, then in what situations, if any, is it appropriate to appeal to bad luck as an excuse
that nullifies ethical responsibility? In addition, since perspectives on good and bad luck
are shaped by the regime, how do these perspectives bear on problems of specifically
political responsibility? Do the responsibilities of political leaders or citizens change
when they encounter circumstances that they themselves regard as extremely unlucky?
Not only Thucydides but also Aristotle and Machiavelli offer surprising, searching, and
unfamiliar reflections on these questions, and in so doing they can help us to gain critical
distance on the treatment of these questions among post-Kantian political theorists today.
Luck, Responsibility, and Justice
Luck is a central element of contemporary debates in philosophy and political theory
concerning problems of moral responsibility and distributive justice. For example, G.A.
Cohen presents the opposition between a just distribution and a lucky one as axiomatic:
“anyone who thinks that initial advantage and inherent capacity are unjust distributors
thinks so because he believes that they make a person’s fate depend too much on sheer
luck.”57 Yet, why is it unjust for a person’s fate to depend too much on sheer luck?
57 Cohen, “On the Currency,” 932.
25
Underlying Cohen’s view is a certain view of just deserts: no one deserves what happens
to him by chance. In the words of Dworkin: “That crucial boundary between chance and
choice is the spine of our ethics and morality, and any serious shift in that boundary is
seriously dislocating.”58 The morality that Dworkin dubs “ours” is, more precisely,
Kantian morality. For Kant, the value of morality consists in the rational purity of the
good will.59 The good will is pure in the sense that its goodness cannot be infected in any
way by what Kant calls “contingency.”60 Rather, the goodness of the good will is wholly
determined by the agent himself, when he chooses to self-legislate the universal moral
law. It follows, for Kant, that contingent events themselves have no moral value.61 When
contemporary political theorists assume that what happens by chance is necessarily
“arbitrary from the moral point of view,” they are drawing upon a Kantian conception
moral responsibility, especially its dismal view of luck.62
58 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 444.
59 See Kant, Groundwork, 17.
60 For example, see Kant, “On the Common Saying,” 69.
61 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 19. But cf. Athanassoulis, Fortune’s Web, 100-34.
Athanassoulis shows that Kant theorizes the role of habituation in moral life in ways that
Williams, for example, did not acknowledge. Still she grants Williams’s central
contention—that Kantian morality as a realm of ultimate value excludes luck.
62 Hurley, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, 1; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., 221-27.
26
It was precisely in order to attack the Kantian (and Rawlsian) view of agency and
moral responsibility that Williams first proposed the idea of “moral luck.”63 Whereas
Kantian morality64 identifies the putatively unconditioned act of willing as the only
legitimate source of moral responsibility, Williams, Nagel, Nussbaum, and others have
shown that it is commonplace and correct to subject to ethical judgment agents whose
actions or identities appear to have been influenced by luck.65 While not every instance of
luck counts as moral luck, since there exist both extenuating circumstances and freak
accidents, theorists of moral luck have struck blows against Kantian approaches by
revealing the existence of at least three types of moral luck—circumstantial luck,
resultant luck, and constitutive luck.66 Concrete examples show that we experience
63 Williams, “Moral Luck,” 116-17, 126-30.
64 Williams audaciously dubs Kantian morality “the peculiar institution” in Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy, 174. See Pippin’s reflections on this coinage in “Williams on
Nietzsche and the Greeks,” 166-67.
65 The main works in this literature I have already mentioned more than once: Williams,
“Moral Luck”; Nagel, “Moral Luck”; Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness; Statman, ed.,
Moral Luck; Athanassoulis, Fortune’s Web. But the literature is now vast, and it extends
into disciplines other than analytical philosophy. For an article in political theory (with a
critical bent) that draws upon the idea of moral luck, see Breiner, “Democratic
Autonomy, Political Ethics, and Moral Luck,” 550-574.
66 Nagel provides the earliest taxonomy in his “Moral Luck.” Note, though, that in
addition to circumstantial luck, resultant luck, and constitutive luck, Nagel includes a
27
ethical emotions ourselves, and elicit the ethical judgments of others, on account of
actions undertaken in lucky or unlucky circumstances (circumstantial luck), on account of
actions issuing in lucky or unlucky effects (resultant luck), and even on account of
aspects of our own identities that seem to have arisen through good or bad luck
(constitutive luck). That the appearance of luck does not by itself nullify ethical
responsibility is a welcome insight: it would be quixotic, and perhaps dangerous, to
attempt to conquer luck absolutely and without qualification.67
Without saying so explicitly, Williams implied that the idea of moral luck harkens
back to Greek political thought and literature.68 And he was right: Thucydides’ History,
among other texts, contains rich and paradigmatic episodes of moral luck. For example,
in 427 B.C., the Athenians decreed the execution of the entire Mytilenean citizenry as
punishment for its attempt to revolt from the Athenian empire (3.36.1-2). Having
regretted the cruelty of their decision, however, the Athenians voted on the following day
to revise it, sparing the Mytilenean demos. Yet, since Athenian triremes carrying the first
decree had already left, albeit reluctantly, for Mytilene, Thucydides says that it was “by
fourth category—causal luck. This fourth category is unhelpful since actions that are
influenced or determined by antecedent causal conditions are either not instances of luck
at all or they fall within the categories of circumstantial or constitutive luck. Nagel,
“Moral Luck,” 146-49; and Statman, “Introduction,” 5-21.
67 Many contemporaries do harbor such quixotic hopes. Again, see Arneson, “Luck
Egalitarianism—A Primer,” 43-44.
68 For example, Williams, Shame and Necessity, 67-74.
28
luck” (kata tuchēn) that a second set of triremes encountered no contrary winds and was
therefore able to arrive in the nick of time to stop the massacre (3.49.3; cf. 7.2.4).69
The Mytilenean episode evokes moral luck of the resultant type: were it not for a
confluence of contingent factors, such as the direction of the wind and the dilatoriness of
the first set of triremes, the Athenians would have executed the Mytilenean demos.
Compared to the Spartans, whose execution of the Plataeans Thucydides juxtaposes to
the Athenians’ pardon of the Mytilenean people (see 3.68), the Athenians appear to have
eschewed indiscriminate and violent revenge, at least in the end.70 But how different the
Athenians would have appeared—and rightly so—had the message of reprieve failed to
arrive in time! In that case, it would have been appropriate to judge the Athenians
responsible—causally, ethically, and politically—for the annihilation of Mytilene
altogether, as they were responsible for the atrocities committed at Scione (5.32.1) and
Melos (5.116). Such a drastic change in our ethical judgment of the Athenians seems to
hinge on luck—hence the paradox of “moral luck.”
69 On “turning points,” “hinge moments,” and “counterfactuals,” in Thucydides’ History,
see Hornblower, Thucydidean Themes, 7-11; Eidinow, Luck, Fate, and Fortune, 141;
Tordoff, “Counterfactual History and Thucydides,” 101-121; Stahl, Man’s Place in
History, 82-96.
70 “The Mytilenean episode, however, is not to be viewed in isolation. The first part of
the third book develops a parallelism between the events on Lesbos and the continuing
siege of Plataea.” Connor, Thucydides, 91.
29
In fact, though, the treatment of these issues found in Greek political thought is
superior to Williams’s own theoretical framework. William’s main point is negative: he
wants to show that the Kantian theory of moral responsibility is dishonest, stultifying,
and ultimately wrong.71 But he himself does not fully outline a theory of responsibility to
rival the one found in the Kantian tradition.72 Aristotle provides a complex theory of
voluntary action and ethical responsibility that can accommodate the moral luck insight.
As I argue in Chapter 2, Aristotle’s account of voluntary action and ethical responsibility,
put forth in Nicomachean Ethics 3.1, employs a precise explanatory framework that
identifies the self-conscious origination of the action by the agent as the sine qua non of
71 “Williams fashions himself a debunker, who sets out to unmask the self-delusional
picture of human beings as autonomous, self-legislating agents.” Balot, “Recollecting
Athens,” 104.
72 In Shame and Necessity, his most theoretical work, Williams outlines “the basic
elements of any conception of responsibility”: “cause, intention, state, and response.” But
he goes on to write that “there is not, and there never could be, just one appropriate way
of adjusting elements to one another . . . just one correct conception of responsibility.”
This statement is true in one sense: different areas of human experience demand different
conceptions of responsibility (e.g., ethical as opposed to legal responsibility). Is it not
possible and necessary, though, to attempt to define these various conceptions of
responsibility? See Williams, Shame and Necessity, 55-74.
30
ethical responsibility (NE 3.1.1111a21-24).73 In Aristotle’s own words: “Since what is
involuntary is that which is the result of force and done on account of ignorance, what is
voluntary would seem to be something whose origin is in the person himself, who knows
the particulars that constitute the action” (NE 3.1.1111a21-24). Aristotle’s attention to the
origins of action enables him to show that agents knowingly initiate many actions that
might seem to occur in lucky or unlucky circumstances or to issue in lucky or unlucky
effects. By contrast, only those actions originating in either external force (bia) or in non-
culpable ignorance (agnoia) are simply involuntary in his view (NE 3.1.1110a1-2). By
doing justice to Aristotle’s expansive account of responsibility in the subsequent chapter,
I provide a more solid theoretical basis for the idea of moral luck, even as I argue against
contemporary scholars, such as Terence Irwin, Susan Sauvé Meyer, and many others,
73 “For Aristotle, to be responsible for an action is a clear-cut, factual matter of the
action’s origins: if it was originated by any of an agent’s desires, or a decision, taken
together with its thought, then it is voluntary and the agent is responsible for it.” Cooper,
“Aristotelian Responsibility,” 296. Cooper succeeds in correcting anachronistic, Kantian
approaches to Aristotelian responsibility by showing that choice is not the primary locus
of responsibility for Aristotle; nor is Aristotle obsessed with questions of moral praise
and blame. Still, I will ultimately criticize his exclusive focus on the so-called causal
picture, that is, the antecedent conditions of action. I engage throughout Chapter 2 with
both Cooper and Nussbaum; see Fragility of Goodness, 28-30, 43, 282-89, 328-42, 380-
81; “Equity and Mercy,” 90-91. While Nussbaum is attuned to the role of luck in NE 3.1,
she offers a surprisingly moralistic interpretation of Aristotelian responsibility.
31
who assimilate Aristotle to Kant by locating in the Nicomachean Ethics a theory of
specifically moral responsibility.74
Thucydides also supplies a useful corrective to Williams. Williams grounds the
existence of moral luck in his observations about actual practices of praise and blame and
ordinary emotional reactions to actions apparently influenced by good or bad luck
without sufficiently acknowledging that these practices and emotions could be confused
or overly punitive. Thucydides lays bare various pathologies of thinking about the issues
of luck and responsibility in democratic Athens—pathologies that I will track and explain
in Chapter 4.75 On the one hand, the Athenians often glorify and take credit for the
unpredictable and contingent results of their deeds, as they did after their lucky victory at
74 Irwin, “Reason and Responsibility,” esp. 134; Meyer, Aristotle on Moral
Responsibility; Bobzien, “Choice and Responsibility in Nicomachean Ethics iii 1-5,” 85;
Furley, “Aristotle on the Voluntary,” 60; Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency, 192-93.
75 “What must have appeared to the disgruntled Athenians as an external force, the bad
luck which brought the plague, appears to Pericles a subjective phenomenon, namely,
their anger, from which he must try to dissuade them. Pericles regards the individual soul
as the locus of chance; and he seems to deny implicitly that the city as a whole can be
seriously affected by chance.” Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 71. In this passage
Edmunds puts forth a beautiful statement of the political-psychological approach to luck
found in Thucydides. Yet his conclusion doesn’t follow: precisely because Pericles
grasps that the individual soul is the locus of chance, the city can be seriously affected by
it. Thus Chapter 4 both builds on and departs from Edmunds.
32
Pylos (see 4.65.4). On the other hand, the Athenians characteristically blame their own
leaders for the unlucky results of actions that they voted for themselves and even for
extreme instances of bad luck for which no human being could reasonably incur political
responsibility (e.g., 2.65.3, 4.65, 8.1.2). As a ubiquitous rhetorical topos that is brought to
bear on issues of ethical and political responsibility, the idea of luck may be abused more
often than it is well-used.
Even so, we will see that Aristotle, Thucydides, and Machiavelli anticipate
Williams insofar as they deny that the apparent influence of bad luck on either the
circumstances or the effects of action necessarily excuses what the agent has done. As
regards political responsibility in particular, Aristotle will suggest the critical point that
founders and statesmen are ineluctably vulnerable to both circumstantial and resultant
luck. These extraordinary political actors necessarily confront contingencies of
circumstance that defy prediction, mastery, and choice; should they seek to lay long-
lasting foundations, moreover, the effects of their deeds will also outstrip their power to
foresee or to control them.
In addition, Machiavelli addresses the deepest problem posed by the moral luck
theorists—that of constitutive luck. Although many scholarly authorities have argued that
the Machiavellian prince tightly controls his own character and even changes his nature
freely and at will,76 I argue that character of the prince is shaped by fortune in
76 See, for example, Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, 167; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s
Virtue, 36-8; McIntosh, “The Modernity of Machiavelli,” 190; Newell, Tyranny, 303-34;
Strauss, Thoughts Machiavelli, 252-3, 297-8.
33
Machiavelli’s own view. As Machiavelli puts the point in the opening line of “The Life
of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca,” “those who have done very great things, and who
have been excellent among the men of their era, have in their birth and origin been
humble and obscure, or at least have been beyond all measure afflicted by Fortune.”77 In
Chapter 3, with Machiavelli as my guide, I explore this paradoxical possibility and its
political ramifications.
In sum, precisely because luck does not exist out there in the world, the areas of
apparent good or bad luck and the areas of responsible human action are overlapping and
cross-cutting. Blurring the lines between various types of responsibility and good or bad
luck also means that one should neither defer to bad luck nor rely on good luck, since
luck itself is a moving target that is often compatible with responsible agency. What,
then, defines efficacious human agency in a world that might seem to be rife with
contingency and luck?
Political Agency in the Face of Contingency
Although political theorists have been eager to theorize political systems that conquer
luck as a matter of justice, they have been much less eager to explore, and to leave
standing, the problems posed by the appearance of luck for political actors. Nor have the
moral luck theorists undertaken this task. With the possible exception of Williams’s
77 Trans. Gilbert. See Machiavelli, “Life of Castruccio,” 533.
34
reflections on “necessary identities” and “political structures” in Shame and Necessity,78
theorists of moral luck more or less neglect the role of luck in political life. Rather,
theorists of moral luck, who almost uniformly belong to the tradition of Anglo-American
analytical philosophy, parse out individual types of moral luck as these apply to
individual agents.79 But in a world in which we find no pure wellspring of human
agency—no Kantian will, shining like a jewel—it is likely that external and internal
contingencies will affect human beings in concurrent and dynamic ways. It may not even
make sense to begin with attention to individuals in contradistinction to the larger
structures that shape identities. The literature on moral luck could be both complemented
and challenged by further reflection on political contingencies.
Just as theorists of moral luck largely abstract from political phenomena, so too
they fail to explain the practical import of their reflections. While Williams is right to
complain, in a Nietzschean register, that contemporary moral philosophy is dishonest and
escapist to the extent that it does not face up to “bad news,”80 we are left to wonder what
a more truthful encounter with luck gets us. Is there nothing more to say about luck
78 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 103-29, 162-67. Note that the theme of moral luck is
absent from Williams’s political writings collected in the posthumous In the Beginning
Was the Deed.
79 For the argument that Anglo-American analytical philosophy is a tradition that should
be understood in light of its own peculiar history, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 12-22.
80 Bernard Williams, “Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” 52. See also Williams, Shame and
Necessity, 161-64; Didion, Year of Magical Thinking, 172-74.
35
beyond the fact that human lives and endeavors, however rational or good, are vulnerable
to disaster? On the contrary, the idea that luck refuses to be mastered by human beings is
a truism found not only in Thucydides, whom Williams praises for this insight, but also
in many other ancient Greek thinkers, from Herodotus to Sophocles, not to mention
moderns and even so-called post-moderns, from Machiavelli to Weber to Rorty.81 As
MacIntyre has argued, supposing that luck is ineradicable does not preclude inquiring
into why and how human beings encounter luck in various areas of their experience;
rather, respect for the idea of luck makes such an inquiry necessary.82
I aim to reveal unfamiliar and specifically political problems related to luck as
these problems emerge in the writings of my chosen authors. For example, Machiavelli
argues that the most extraordinary political actors prove to be not only externally but also
internally vulnerable to luck. Because the virtuosi are children of chance, whether a state
manages to discover the right leader at the right time is, even for Machiavelli’s Rome,
largely a matter of luck (e.g., D 3.9). A fortiori, a city’s very existence can hang on
apparent good or bad luck; as we have seen, the salvation of Mytilene depended on
various contingent factors in Thucydides’ own view. Aristotle, for his part, shows in
Book 5 of the Politics that unpredictable and largely uncontrollable shifts in the
81 For example, Herodotus, History 1.29-33, 3.40, 7.10; Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus
1186-96, and Ajax 485-86; Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 4-7, 25-31; Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity esp. 31, 51, 60. For my reading of Machiavelli, see
Chapter 3.
82 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 105.
36
composition of the regime can trigger civic strife or even regime change. Indeed,
Aristotle frequently invokes the common-sense view of luck in the Politics because this
idea does justice to the political experience of both ordinary citizens and extraordinary
political leaders, for whom the political world frequently presents itself as a welter of
external circumstances and surprising consequences that, in combination with human
action, can produce the most extraordinary political changes.
On the one hand, then, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Thucydides reveal unfamiliar
problems posed by the appearance of luck in political life. On the other hand, each
thinker theorizes political agency in light of these problems—as he must, in fact, since
each also casts luck as agency’s shadow, rather than as a distinct phenomenon in and of
itself. In particular, I argue that these thinkers effect a trans-valuation of the virtue of
practical wisdom, modifying it in light of the problems posed by the appearance of luck
in politics.83 They also consider, more broadly, how the appearance of luck can elicit the
expression of other virtues of character, such as courage, in addition to delusive
emotions, such as hope and fear. Examining the dynamic relation between political
agency and contingency is the ultimate aim of this project.
83 I am in dialogue with the political theory literature on practical wisdom and judgment,
and especially the literature that is rooted in Greek political thought. For example, Beiner,
Political Judgment, esp. 72-97, 118-19; Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 84, 92-101,
109-10, 121, 124-26; Ober, “Democracy’s Wisdom,” 104-22; Ruderman, “Aristotle and
the Recovery of Political Judgment,” 409-420; Salkever, Finding the Mean, 75, 138-142,
257-58.
37
Through the examination of the idea of luck in Aristotle’s Physics, Nicomachean
Ethics, and Politics, Chapter 2 yields lessons about Aristotelian practical wisdom. In the
Politics, Aristotle aims to educate the practical wisdom (phronēsis; Pol. 4.1.1289a13) of
legislators and statesmen by explaining the true origins of political change that lie
beneath the appearance of either good or bad luck (e.g., Pol. 5.3.1303a3-14). At the same
time, however, Aristotle uses the idea of luck to bring home to the extraordinary political
actor the limits of his own practical wisdom. Political leaders might acquire self-
knowledge by both exploring the outer reaches of their foresight and control and by
envisioning irregular and destructive calamities that could otherwise overwhelm their
practical wisdom in the event.
Machiavelli’s chief concern is with this latter problem: how can princes and
whole states eschew intoxication in good fortune and abjectness in bad? On my reading
of The Prince, the Discourses, and other minor works, such as “The Life of Castruccio,”
Machiavelli suggests that the experience of serious misfortune can push the princely
individual to develop the kind of virtue that will enable him to think straight and to
remain self-sufficient no matter the appearance of good or bad luck. Paradoxically, then,
bad luck is good luck, because the experience of bad luck can bring home to the virtuoso
the necessity of prudence.84 In its Machiavellian definition, prudence refers to a quasi-
84 This argument challenges many prevalent interpretations of fortuna in Machiavelli’s
thought. Most of these interpretations exaggerate the power of Machiavellian virtue,
whether princely or republican, to control fortune. Moreover, the internal vulnerability of
the prince to the shaping power of fortune has not been explored. In addition to the
38
Stoical quality of intellectual self-reliance—albeit divorced from the ethical ends, such as
justice or honestas, that guided prudence according the Stoics themselves. In the
Discourses, moreover, Machiavelli shows that the prince can imprint his prudent
character on the people by educating them and by managing their emotions in warfare.
Not only “great men” but also “strong republics” eschew “becoming insolent in good
fortune and abject in bad” (D 3.31.3). With Machiavelli, ordinary people enter the scene,
and we begin to consider the possibility of a politics in which many citizens exercise
efficacious agency in the face of contingency.
As I argue in the fourth and final chapter, Thucydides offers a rich example of a
democratic politics in which the idea of bad luck looms large and supplies a reason for
the cultivation and expression of both deliberative rationality and daring. More precisely,
Thucydides’ Pericles emphasizes the Athenian-democratic virtues of deliberative
rationality (gnōmē) and daring (tolma), especially as responses to apparent good or bad
luck (e.g., 1.140.1, 2.43.5, 2.64.6). Influential interpreters of Thucydides have caricatured
Pericles’ speeches on these topics. For Lowell Edmunds, among others, Pericles
“trivializes” and “disparages chance,” on the grounds that bad luck can be reduced to
avoidable human error.85 Yet these scholars have not recognized that Pericles in fact
interpretations of Skinner, Pocock, Strauss, Mansfield, and Newell, all cited above, see,
for example, McCormick, “Addressing the Political Exception,” 888-900; Benner,
“Machiavelli’s Amoral Fortuna,” 481-99.
85 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 17, 71, 74; see also 43, 81, 144. See also Orwin,
Humanity of Thucydides, 25 n. 28, 170; Forde, Ambition to Rule, 60; Foster, Thucydides,
39
elaborates a complex view of deliberative rationality that is explicitly suited to the
possibility and indeed the likelihood of bad luck in war. Moreover, since Pericles
theorizes the complex and synergistic relationship between deliberative rationality and
daring as distinctively Athenian-democratic virtues, he provides a rich picture of a
democratic politics of luck that has both intellectual and ethical dimensions.
True, as we will see, Thucydides is a critic of Periclean Athens. The Athenians
repeatedly fell short of the ideal of Periclean deliberative rationality, allowing the
appearance of good luck in particular to inflame their hope and to corrupt their
deliberative practices. Even so, Thucydides marvels at Athenian daring: although the
Athenians certainly required statesmen such as Pericles to manipulate their emotions in
many situations, they also exhibited appropriate fear and incredible energy in the face of
disasters that they themselves regarded as extremely unlucky (see 2.65.12, 7.28, 8.1.4).
What is more, Thucydides himself embodies a virtue that resonates with the Athenians’
own democratic political culture—self-critical honesty about the past. Strikingly,
Thucydides exposes self-serving speeches that invoke luck as a rhetorical topos, and he
thereby holds up for the judgment of the reader reversals of fortune that have been
mendaciously excused, mythologized, or punished.
Together with Machiavelli and Aristotle, Thucydides issues an untimely challenge
to citizens and political theorists today. On the one hand, these writers lead us to doubt
the characteristically “modern” presumption that we have “arrived at a point where
Pericles, and Periclean Imperialism, 205; Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity,
35-37, 47; Monoson and Loriaux, “Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy,” 289.
40
constraint can be routed, or at least reduced as far as possible,” especially in political
life.86 On the other hand, they can also help us to rethink political agency. Thucydides’
paradoxical suggestion is that an honest and appropriately fearful regard for bad luck
could contribute to both daring and deliberation among democratic citizens.
86 Visser, Beyond Fate, 1.
41
CHAPTER 2: THE IDEA OF LUCK IN ARISTOTLE’S THOUGHT
What is luck (tuchē)? This is the central question of Book 2, Chapters 4-6 of Aristotle’s
Physics—the starting point of my inquiry.1 Cynthia Freeland has identified two
contrasting interpretations of this text in particular and of the idea of luck in general.2 On
the one hand, “causal realists” such as Freeland herself contend that the idea of luck
refers to an objective feature of reality—namely, to an “accidental cause” (aitia kata
sumbebēkos) of motion or change (Phys. 2.5.197a5, 33). 3 Freeland returns to the Stagirite
1 Translations of the Physics refer to Apostle, trans., Aristotle’s Physics. I have modified
Apostle’s translations as necessary, having consulted the Greek of the Oxford text, edited
and revised by Ross. Modifications may also reflect the helpful translations and
commentaries of Charlton, trans., Aristotle’s Physics: Books I and II; Hope, trans.,
Physics. “Luck” is the most common translation of tuchē; automaton, of “chance.” For
justifications of these translations, see Judson, “Chance,” 73-74, and my own discussion
of the Aristotelian vocabulary of luck in Chapter 1.
2 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” esp. 68-71; see also Freeland, “Plot Imitates Action.”
3 In addition to Freeland, causal realist interpreters of the Physics include Dudley,
Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, esp. 27-31; Judson, “Chance,” 97-99; Matthews,
“Accidental Unities”; Meyer, “Aristotle, Teleology, Reduction,” 798-803. For the most
recent treatment of these issues, see Allen, “Aristotle on chance as an accidental cause.”
Essential pre-modern commentaries are those of Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s
Physics; and Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 2. On these texts, see also Lang,
Aristotle’s Physics and Its Medieval Varieties.
42
because on her reading of the Physics “accidental causes are really ‘out there’ in the
world, since intrinsic causal relations and accidental unities in which they are grounded
are objective features of reality.”4 As we have seen, many influential theorists of luck
implicitly subscribe to the “causal realist” view. When Martha Nussbaum defines luck as
“external happening,” when Ronald Dworkin uses the idea of “brute luck” to refer to
wholly unpredictable events that befall agents no matter what they know or do, each
theorist supposes that luck refers to phenomena that are “really ‘out there’ in the world.”5
On the other hand, Freeland argues against what she calls the “pragmatist” view
of luck. For pragmatists, the idea of luck refers to an explanation or an interpretation of
an unpredictable outcome.6 Freeland correctly associates the pragmatist approach with
those Aristotelian scholars who argue that Aristotelian aitiai refer to explanations rather
than to causes.7 For example, Julia Annas writes that Aristotle’s “examples of X’s
4 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 69-70. See also Meyer, “Aristotle, Teleology,
Reduction,” 798-99: “it is a fact in rerum natura whether the causal relation between two
entities is intrinsic or accidental.”
5 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 334; Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of
Resources,” 293. In addition, see Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 38.
6 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 62. Freeland’s exemplar of the pragmatist approach is
van Fraassen, The Scientific Image. For a recent and notorious book on the topic of luck
that also fits Freeland’s definition of pragmatism, see Taleb, Black Swan.
7 See Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 49-51; Barnes, Posterior Analytics, 89-90; Annas,
“Inefficent Causes,” 319; Charlton, trans., Aristotle’s Physics, 98-104; Hocutt,
43
standing as an aitia to Y include: the bronze to the statue; the ratio 2:1 to the octave; the
planner to the deed; the aim of health to walking (Physics 194b23-35). These cannot all
be causes without absurdity. . . . It is a great improvement to cease thinking of an aitia as
a cause and to treat it instead as an explanation, a ‘because.’”8
Interestingly, Annas and other exponents of the “explanation” approach have not
examined Aristotle’s account of luck as an aitia kata sumbebēkos.9 My reading of
Physics 2.4-6 will show that, for Aristotle, the idea of luck indeed refers to an explanation
or an interpretation as opposed to a cause. More precisely, the idea of luck is invoked
when an unexpected outcome appears to have a striking effect on human flourishing in
the eyes of some agent or observer. Luck interests Aristotle—and it should interest us—
“Aristotle’s Four Becauses,” esp. 385-87; Moravcsik, “Aristotle on Adequate
Explanations”; Schofield, “Explanatory Projects”; Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame,
69; Stein, “Causation and Explanation in Aristotle,” 705. The reevaluation of the concept
of aitia in Aristotle’s philosophy arguably originated with Vlastos, “Reasons and Causes
in the Phaedo.” Equally influential is Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium.
8 Annas, “Inefficient Causes,” 319; see also Moravcsik, “Aristotle on Adequate
Explanations,” 3-6.
9 One possible exception is Sorabji’s Necessity, Cause, and Blame. Yet Sorabji argues,
unconvincingly, that coincidences are wholly undetermined according to Aristotle (e.g.,
x-xi, 139). In my view, Aristotle’s epistemic approach to luck is perfectly compatible
with the possibility that apparently lucky or unlucky outcomes have determinate origins
and explanations.
44
primarily because invocations of luck lay bare the epistemic limitations and ethical
orientations that lead human beings to invest unexpected outcomes with extraordinary
significance.
Aristotle’s epistemic approach to the topic of luck in the Physics has important
implications for his ethical thought.10 When one ceases to think of luck as a cause that
determines human action in the manner of an external force, then it is possible to see that
many actions that might seem to be influenced by luck in fact originate in agents
themselves. Consequently, whereas many contemporary commentators suppose that the
influence of luck on human action usually nullifies ethical (and legal) responsibility,
Aristotle argues, especially in Nicomachean Ethics 3.1, that agents remain responsible for
all actions that they themselves knowingly initiate (NE 3.1.1111a22-23)—even those
actions that may appear to have been undertaken in lucky or unlucky circumstances or to
10 Lennox rightly argues that “in Aristotle’s ethical writings, chance plays a crucial role
in determining responsibility for an action. It would seem, then, that a proper grasp of his
considered doctrine of chance, which is worked out in Ph II 4-6, is central to the
evaluation of a number of areas of his philosophy.” Lennox, “Aristotle on Chance,” 52.
To be clear, I do not assume that Aristotle’s account of the idea of luck in the Physics
informs his remarks on luck in the Nicomachean Ethics or in any other work. Instead I
approach the treatments of luck in the Physics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Politics
each on its own terms—though I find a significant degree of consistency among them.
45
have issued in lucky or unlucky effects (e.g., NE 3.1.1110a4-14).11 Aristotle thereby
illuminates the ethical seriousness of agency and the task of practical wisdom: to
deliberate and to act in accordance with the particulars of the situation, and to take
responsibility for one’s own actions.
The lessons about luck, responsibility, and practical wisdom that I tease out of
Physics 2.4-6 and NE 3.1 shed light on Aristotle’s political thought in turn. In the
Politics, Aristotle aims to educate the practical wisdom (phronēsis; Pol. 4.1.1289a13) of
legislators and statesmen by explaining the true origins of political change that lie
beneath the appearance of either good or bad luck (e.g., Pol. 5.3.1303a3-14).12 At the
same time, Aristotle frequently appeals to the common-sense idea of luck (e.g., Pol.
11 Unless otherwise noted, translations of the Nicomachean Ethics refer to Bartlett and
Collins, trans., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. My own translations and transliterations
refer to the Greek edition of Bywater, Ethica Nicomachea. Even Nussbaum argues,
surprisingly, that the influence of luck on the circumstances of action often nullifies both
ethical and legal responsibility; see especially “Equity and Mercy,” 91; Fragility of
Goodness, 334-35. A more promising approach to Aristotle’s treatment of these issues in
the Nicomachean Ethics can be found in Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility.” Cooper’s
key insight is that Aristotle theorizes responsibility for actions, not specifically moral
responsibility.
12 Translations of Aristotle’s Politics refer to Lord, trans., Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd ed. In
certain cases, I favor instead Keyt, trans., Aristotle: Politics Books V and VI. My own
translations and transliterations refer to Newman, ed., The Politics of Aristotle.
46
7.12.1331b21-22); in so doing, he aims to clarify the task of political leadership. On the
Aristotelian account, the responsibility of the political leader to shape the regime through
the exercise of practical wisdom extends beyond his power fully to predict or to control
the circumstances or the effects of his deeds.13
The Idea of Luck in Physics 2.4-6
Interpretations of Aristotle’s account of luck (tuchē) in Physics 2.4-6 hinge on the
translation and analysis of the phrase aitia kata sumbebēkos; for Aristotle defines the idea
of luck as “an aitia kata sumbebēkos of things done according to choice and for the sake
of something” (kata prohairesin tōn heneka tou; Phys. 2.5.197a5-6). The most common
translation of this phrase is “accidental cause,” a rendering that tacitly supports
Freeland’s “causal realist” reading. True, this translation is rooted in an influential
13 Attending to the idea of luck therefore clarifies Aristotle’s stance toward political
reform and therewith the practical import of the Politics. Aristotle is neither a
(progressive) “social democrat” nor a “conservative.” Cf. Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social
Democracy”; Pangle, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics, esp. 84-85, 199. Aristotle’s
point, rather, is that the task of political reform is as necessary and worthwhile as it is
fraught with contingency and peril. Some commentators have noted that Aristotle both
affirms political agency while simultaneously revealing the risks and uncertainties
endemic to political life—even if they have not focused on this productive tension.
Especially worthwhile are the reflections found in Garver, Aristotle’s Politics, 143-44;
Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 139-40; Salkever, “Whose Prayer?,” 39-42.
47
philosophical tradition: for Platonic and Christian commentators such as Simplicius and
Aquinas, the aition kata sumbebēkos is an accidental cause because it is a property
inherent in the substance that comprises the aition kath’ hauto, the intrinsic cause.14
Yet, in my view, rendering aitia kata sumbebēkos as “accidental cause” is neither
precise nor sound. A better translation, following Jonathan Barnes, would be “contingent
explanation.”15 The superiority of the “explanation” translation emerges through
14 Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 2, 97; Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics,
101-103; Dudley, Aristotle on Chance, 30. For Machiavelli’s appropriation of the
Thomistic language of substance and accident, see McCormick, “Machiavelli’s
‘Accidents,’” 888-889. On Aristotle’s usage of both the feminine noun aitia and the
neuter substantive adjective aition, see Jaume Casals and Jesús Hernández Reynés, “A
Note on the Use of aitia and aition,” 89-95.
15 “‘Explanation’ and its cognates render aitia and its cognates. . . . Roughly speaking, to
give an aitia for something is to say why it is the case, and X is an aitia of Y provided that
Y is because of X. . . . The standard English translation is ‘cause’ (with its cognates); but
in many contexts this is false, or at any rate seriously misleading.” Barnes, Posterior
Analytics, 89-90. “The man sitting over there is Socrates expresses an accidental identity,
according to Aristotle; for it is at best an accident—a contingent truth—that Socrates is
sitting. . . .” Barnes, “Review of Edwin Hartman,” 59, cited in Mathews, “Accidental
Unities,” 228. Putting these two passages together, one arrives at “contingent
explanation” as a possible translation of aitia kata sumbebēkos. This translation conveys,
crucially, that what is contingent is the explanation itself rather than a property inherent
48
examination of Aristotle’s concrete examples. Consider the classic example found in
Physics 2.5: while the aition kath’ hauto of the house is the art of building, the aition kata
sumbebēkos refers to an indefinite (aoriston) number of contingent facts about a
particular builder of a particular house, including his complexion and musical ability (Ph.
2.5.196b24-29).16 For Freeland, the builder’s musicianship counts as an accidental cause
of the house because his musicianship indirectly figures into the causal story of the
house’s genesis.17 More precisely, the builder’s musicianship is a property inherent in the
substance (i.e., the builder himself) that performed the efficient-causal work of
building.18 But this argument is mysterious: does the builder’s musicianship actually
contribute to the construction of the house in any meaningful way?
In fact, Aristotle’s point is that there is no explanatory connection between the
construction of the house and the fact that the builder knows how to play music. Richard
Sorabji writes that “accidents are unusual conjunctions of items whose association is not
self-explanatory.”19 Indeed, for Aristotle, it is possible to associate an indefinite number
in a substance. Note that while many commentators translate aitia as “explanation,”
Barnes employs this translation throughout his rendering of the Posterior Analytics.
16 Aristotle uses this same example, with slight variations, at Met. 6.2.1026b35-1027a2.
17 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 55-58.
18 See also Allen, “Aristotle on chance,” 76-77; Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action,
46; Copi, “Essence and Accident,” 164-65; Dudley, Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, 30.
19 Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 5. Sorabji follows Kirwan, Aristotle:
Metaphysics, 180-82.
49
of contingencies with any one thing: “the intrinsic explanation of something is definite
(hōrismenon), but the contingent explanation is indefinite (to de kata sumbebēkos
aoriston), for limitless (apeira) contingencies may belong to a thing” (Phys. 2.5.196b28-
29). Because it would be absurd to hold that an indefinite number of properties might
count as causes of some definite state of affairs, Aristotle cannot view the aition kata
sumbebēkos as a cause.
Rather, the aition kata sumbebēkos is an epistemic phenomenon. Consider that
Aristotle excludes contingent explanations from scientific knowledge (epistēmē): “it is
obvious that no science deals with the contingent; for every discipline deals either with
that [which is] always or with [that which is] for the most part” (Met. 6.2.1027a20-22).20
To explain the purposive motions of nature in the Physics, Aristotle employs four types
of intrinsic explanations: “since the explanations are four, it is the task of the physicist to
understand all of them; and as a physicist he should state the why by referring to all of
them—the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final” (Phys. 2.7.198a22-24).21 By
20 Kirwan, trans., Aristotle: Metaphysics, 71.
21 “In saying that there are four kinds of aitiai, Aristotle is saying that the question, why
something is the case, can be answered in four mutually irreducible ways, giving four
different types of explanation. And since explanation is an epistemological notion, we
can see why Aristotle thinks that to know a thing you must know its aitiai and why in the
Posterior Analytics aitiai are given middle terms in demonstrative syllogisms which set
out perspicuously the achievements of scientific knowledge in per se predications.”
50
contrast, Aristotle shows that a contingent explanation works as an explanation only in
the case that the person who receives it understands certain pieces of contextual
information.22 For example, if there happened to be two builders living in the same town,
and of the two only one played music, then it would be useful to explain the construction
of a new house by saying, “the musician built it.” Without this background knowledge,
however, the explanans would be disconnected from the explanandum; the explanation is
contingent for precisely this reason.
Why, then, does Aristotle cast the idea of tuchē as a type of contingent
explanation? His chief example of luck as an aitia kata sumbebēkos is that of a creditor
who happens to meet his debtor in the marketplace and consequently recovers his debt.
Aristotle explains that while the creditor “would have gone to a certain place for the sake
of getting the money, had he known; but he went here not for the sake of this; and it just
happened (sunebē) that he got the money when he went there; and this happened neither
for the most part (epi to polu) whenever he went there nor of necessity” (ex anankēs;
Phys. 2.5.196b34-197a1). Commentators who subscribe to the causal realist approach
find themselves tasked with identifying the accidental and intrinsic causal pairing in this
example. John Dudley writes that “the per se or fundamental cause—assimilated by
Aristotle to a substantial cause—of collecting the debt is then seen as the cause in the
mind of the man which made him go to the market-place, while the accidental cause of
Annas, “Inefficient Causes,” 319. See also Moravcsik, “Aristotle on Adequate
Explanations,” 6.
22 See Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 5.
51
collecting the debt is the mental recognition of the significance of the coincidental
meeting with his debtor.”23 Others argue that the “accidental cause” is not the recovery of
the money but rather the creditor’s decision to go to the market in the first place.24
In Aristotle’s own view, however, the creditor-debtor example shows that “the
aitiai of things which might come to be by luck (an genoito to apo tuchēs) are of
necessity indefinite” (aorista; Phys. 2.5.197a9-10). Precisely because there is no apparent
link between the creditor’s decision to pass through the marketplace and his recovery of
the debt, Aristotle argues that “in going to a place and getting the money . . . the
contingent explanations might be a great many, such as wishing to see someone or
following someone or avoiding someone or going to see a play” (Phys. 2.5.197a15-19).
The idea of luck falls within the category of the contingent explanation because the
unpredictable outcomes of human action that we call lucky or unlucky elicit an indefinite
range of contingent explanations rather than a defined set of intrinsic explanations: “since
the explanations are indefinite luck too is indefinite” (Phys. 2.5.197a21). In other words,
we recur to luck as a contingent explanation when an unpredictable outcome seems to
lack intrinsic explanations.
To be sure, the apparent unavailability of intrinsic explanations and the
corresponding invocation of the idea of luck does not mean, as Richard Sorabji has
23 Dudley, Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, 35-36.
24 See Meyer, “Aristotle, Teleology, Reduction,” 802-803; Charlton, Aristotle’s Physics,
107; Bolotin, An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics, 37.
52
argued, that what happens by luck is altogether undetermined.25 Aristotle clearly
vindicates both the common opinion that that lucky or unlucky outcomes are inscrutable
and the more philosophic view that strictly speaking all motions of nature and human
action admit of precise and determinate explanations. In Aristotle’s own words: “luck
seems to be something indefinite and inscrutable to man (adēlos anthrōpō), and yet there
is a sense in which nothing would seem to come to be by luck (ouden apo tuchēs doxeien
an gignesthai); for both opinions are correct” (Phys. 2.5.197a10-12). But how can
Aristotle save both endoxa—the opinion of “the many” and that of “the wise,”
respectively (see Phys. 2.4.195a36-196b6)?
The solution lies in Aristotle’s view of luck as a type of explanation, as an
epistemic phenomenon.26 With the so-called many, Aristotle observes that human beings
invoke the idea of luck when the outcomes of their actions appear to have come about
irrespective of their own deliberations, especially when these outcomes either satisfy or
thwart their choices in ways both spectacular and uncontrollable (Phys. 2.5.197a5-6).27 In
particular, the idea of luck often attaches to the special class of unpredictable and
uncontrollable outcomes that seem to have an extraordinary impact on human flourishing
25 See Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 139.
26 See Ross’s apt formulation in Aristotle, 90: “chance is not an operative cause but only
a name for a certain kind of connexion between events.”
27 “Chance is not a disturbance of the natural order, it is just that in the affairs of men,
events occur which look as though they have occurred for a certain purpose when they
have not.” Lear, The Desire to Understand, 37.
53
(Phys 2.5.197a26-27).28 Aristotle’s examples of lucky or unlucky outcomes in the
Physics and the Metaphysics include, in addition to the recovery of the debt, various
coincidences that save lives or destroy them. Walking to fetch water after eating a salty
meal, a man is murdered at the well (Met. 6.3.1027b3-1027b13). Another person happens
to discover a kidnapping victim—perhaps a member of his own family—and frees him
by paying the ransom (Phys. 2.8.199b20-25). Finally, the shovel of a gardener strikes
something solid, namely, buried treasure (Met. 5.30.1025a15-19). Like the plots of
comedies or tragedies, these actions turn on unexpected reversals that yield or ruin
prosperity and provoke the characteristic tragic response of wonder, pity, and fear.29
28 See also NE 7.13.1153b25: the “definition” (horos) of “good luck” (eutuchia) is
“relative to flourishing” (pros tēn eudaimonian). Dudley points in this direction when he
writes, somewhat ambiguously, that chance is both “coincidental” and “meaningful” for
Aristotle. See Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, 33-37.
29 True, in the Poetics, Aristotle might seem to say that tragic action should not hinge on
luck alone. On closer examination, however, he in fact praises tragic plots that feature
unlucky turnabouts of precisely the kind theorized in the Physics: “Since tragic mimesis
portrays not just a whole action, but events which are fearful and pitiful, this can best be
achieved when things occur contrary to expectation yet still on account of one another. A
sense of wonder will be more likely to be aroused in this way than as a result of the
simply arbitrary or fortuitous, since even what happens by luck make the greatest impact
of wonder when they appear to have a purpose (as in the case where Mitys’ statue fell on
Mitys’ murderer and killed him, while he was looking at: such things do not seem to
54
Aristotle thus saves the common opinion that luck is strikingly mysterious and
unpredictable (paralogos), even as he implicitly rejects the equally common view that
luck is something “godlike” (hōs theiōn; Phys. 2.4.196b6).
At the same time, Aristotle eventually defends a deflationary view of luck that he
had initially attributed to pre-Socratic, atomist philosophers such as Empedocles and
Democritus: “there is a sense in which nothing would seem to come to be by luck” (Phys.
2.5.197a12; cf. 2.4.196a1-35).30 From the fact that human beings often fail to discover
non-contingent explanations of a unexpected outcomes, it hardly follows that such
explanations do not exist: “luck is an explanation only contingently (estin aition hōs
sumbebēkos hē tuchē); but as an explanation without qualification, it explains nothing”
(Phys. 2.5.197a13-14; see also Met. 5.3.1025a23). Because, in the words of Charlton,
“the same thing under one description may have a definite and proper [explanation], and
under another be due to [luck],” the appearance of good or bad luck actually invites the
search for more determinate explanations.31 Even so, Aristotle departs from Empedocles
happen without reason). So then, plot structures which embody this principle must be
superior” (Poetics 1452a1-10). I have slightly modified the translation of Halliwell, The
Poetics of Aristotle, 42.
30 See also Cicero, De Fato 39, in which Cicero groups together Aristotle, Empedocles,
Democritus, and Heraclitus on the grounds that each of these thinkers holds that
everything that happens happens of necessity.
31 Charlton, Aristotle’s Physics, 108. Where Charlton writes “cause” and “chance,” I have
written “explanation” and “luck.” Note that even among contingent explanations, it is
55
and Democritus in a crucial respect: while the atomists had denied that luck refers to a
cause in its own right, they had simultaneously maintained, perhaps confusedly, that the
formation of the universe occurred by luck.32 Aristotle limits the idea of luck to the
domain of human action: “luck is necessarily an explanation of what may happen through
action” (praxis; Phys. 2.6.197b1-2). Hence Aristotle’s account of luck is thoroughly
anthropocentric, whereas the atomists had transformed luck into a cosmic starting point.
In sum, Aristotle’s investigation of luck saves the phenomena. On the one hand,
Aristotle emphatically rejects the causal realist view that “accidental causes are really
‘out there’ in the world.”33 The undefined field of luck varies instead with the intellectual
and ethical dispositions that observers bring to bear on ostensibly unpredictable
outcomes. On the other hand, for all that the idea of luck is used to refer to an imprecise
and even chaotic set of phenomena, Aristotle’s epistemic approach to the topic clarifies
the kinds of outcomes that we routinely call lucky or unlucky. Those outcomes that
appear unpredictable to the point of being uncontrollable and which also have a striking
effect on human flourishing elicit the idea of luck as a contingent explanation. Equally
clear to Aristotle that some are “nearer than others” (allôn eggutera; Phys. 2.5.197a25);
for example, when a sick person makes a miraculous recovery, his most recent medical
procedure is a more likely explanation than the sun or the wind (Phys. 2.5.197a22-25).
32 On the atomistic account of the origins of the universe, see Bailey, The Greek Atomists
and Epicurus, 139-43. Cf. Plato, Tim. 69c.
33 Freeland, “Accidental Causes,” 69-70.
56
important, Aristotle’s epistemic approach emphasizes the fact that because it is a
contingent explanation the idea of luck masks underlying intrinsic explanations.
As a final point, consider that Aristotle also examines unpredictable outcomes of
non-human nature or necessity (as opposed to the unpredictable outcomes of human
action), for which he reserves the concept of chance (automaton; Phys. 197a36-197b20).
In a striking image, Aristotle depicts a man who has been struck by a falling stone: “the
stone fell not for the sake of striking the man, but by chance (apo tou automatou), seeing
that it might have been thrown by someone for the sake of striking the man” (Phys.
2.5.197b31-33). Notice that this central example assimilates chance to luck: Aristotle
suggests that the idea of chance is invoked when an unpredictable natural occurrence
appears as if it might have occurred through deliberate human action.34 From beginning
to end, Aristotle’s treatment of luck and chance situates these ideas against the
background of the human choice and flourishing.
True, Aristotle’s presentation isn’t simply anthropocentric insofar as he contrasts
what happens by chance and luck with the teleological motions of nature: “chance and
luck are posterior to intellect and nature” (Phys. 198a9-10). Yet for Aristotle this point is
obvious. The chance genesis of a six-fingered man is the exception that proves the rule:
nature tends to realize certain ends and therefore demands explanation in light of those
ends. The more interesting point is that the idea of luck should not be dismissed as a form
of “insignificant speech,” to borrow a memorable line from Hobbes, since this idea has a
34 Again, see the parallel passage at Poetics 1452a6-8; also Bolotin, An Approach to
Aristotle’s Physics, 39.
57
hold on human beings, even though it is hardly necessary in order to explain what
happens in non-human nature or in the cosmos.35 As long as we remain the credulous
creatures that we are, the idea of luck will appeal to us—and we to it.
Luck and Responsibility for Actions in NE 3.1
Having examined Aristotle’s analysis of luck in the Physics, we are now in a positon to
grasp the role of luck in NE 3.1—a crucial and well-known passage in which Aristotle
distinguishes between the voluntary (hekousion) and the involuntary (akousion) and
establishes conditions of responsibility for actions.36 For Aristotle, the apparent influence
35 Hobbes, Leviathan, 7.
36 NE 3.1 has attracted extensive commentary in the critical literature, in which one finds
multiple approaches to Aristotle’s discussion of responsibility. For many commentators,
Aristotle puts forth a theory of specifically moral responsibility. See Bobzien, “Choice
and Responsibility in Nicomachean Ethics iii 1-5,” esp. 85; Furley, “Aristotle on the
Voluntary,” 60; Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency, 192-93; Irwin, “Reason and
Responsibility,” esp. 134; Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility. Other scholars have
emphasized Aristotle’s dialogue with Athenian legal thought and practice: for example,
Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame, 288-295; Curren, “The Contribution of
Nicomachean Ethics iii 5 to Aristotle’s Theory of Responsibility.” For yet another camp,
the key point of reference is Plato, especially the Socratic paradox that no one does
wrong knowingly or voluntarily: Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 62-67;
Roberts, “Aristotle on Responsibility for Action and Character,” 23-36. The most
58
of luck on action does not necessarily render action involuntary or nullify the agent’s
responsibility for the action. Since the idea of luck refers to a contingent explanation of
action rather than to a cause in its own right, Aristotle shows that agents knowingly
initiate many actions that might seem to occur in lucky or unlucky circumstances or to
issue in lucky or unlucky effects. By contrast, those actions originating in either external
force (bia) or in non-culpable ignorance (agnoia) are simply involuntary (NE 3.1.1110a1-
2). It follows on the Aristotelian account that human beings can be considered
responsible for many actions that they may regard as seriously lucky or unlucky. As we
will see, by expanding the domain of responsible action to include actions that might
seem to have been influenced by luck, Aristotle offers an education in both practical
promising approach, in my view, is that of Cooper, who argues that Aristotle theorizes
causal rather than moral responsibility; see Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility.” I
engage throughout with both Cooper and Nussbaum; see Fragility of Goodness, 28-30,
43, 282-89, 328-42, 380-81; “Equity and Mercy,” 90-91. While Nussbaum is attuned to
the role of luck in NE 3.1, she offers a surprisingly moralistic interpretation of
Aristotelian responsibility. Finally, for analysis of issues of voluntariness, responsibility,
luck, and error in the Eudemian Ethics as well as the Nicomachean Ethics, see Anthony
Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will; and in particular Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 56-
75, for its analysis of tuchē in the penultimate chapter of the EE.
59
wisdom and the ethical seriousness of agency that could serve virtuous individuals and
legislators or statesmen seeking to educate citizens to virtue (see NE 3.1.1109b34-5).37
Aristotle divides NE 3.1 into two parts that correspond to the two criteria of
involuntary action: the first treats actions influenced by external force (bia) or
compulsion (anankē), whereas the second focuses on actions undertaken out of ignorance
(agnoia). In the first part, Aristotle chiefly devotes his attention to so-called “mixed”
(miktai) actions that appear to be at once voluntary and compulsory (NE 3.1.1110a13);
these are tough cases that “admit of dispute” (NE 3.1.1110a9). More precisely, while
Aristotle grants that external force nullifies voluntariness and hence responsibility for the
action in the case that “the person who is acting or undergoing something contributes
nothing (mēden sumballetai), for example, if a wind, or people have control over
someone, should carry him off,” he also examines mixed actions that seem to originate in
both the agent himself and in compulsory external circumstances (NE 3.1.1110a2).
Aristotle’s examples include a captain who throws his cargo overboard during a storm in
order to save his ship and a citizen whose family has been seized by a tyrant and
37 In addition to the fact that NE 3.1 bears directly on the question of responsibility for
actions apparently influenced by luck, another reason for moving from Physics 2.4-6 to NE
3.1 is the etymological link between aitia and aitios, explanation and responsibility. Lionel
Pearson writes that the word aitia “has the active meaning of ‘accusation’ ‘complaint’
‘grievance’ and the corresponding passive meaning ‘guilt’ ‘blame’ ‘responsibility’; and by
logical development it also means ‘that which is responsible’. . . .” Pearson, “Prophasis
and Aitia,” 205. Cf. Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 32-38.
60
threatened with harm unless the man agrees “to do something shameful” on the tyrant’s
behalf (NE 3.1.1110a5-10).
Commentators have reasonably invoked the idea of luck when analyzing these
examples. Cooper writes that “the situation [of the ship’s captain] . . . was unlucky; he is
the victim of misfortune.”38 Likewise, of the man in the grip of the tyrant, Cooper writes
that “he too is the victim of bad luck: the misfortune of falling, with his family, into the
clutches of a tyrant.” For Martha Nussbaum, “bad luck” can push an individual to do
“things that he or she would never have done but for the conflict situation. . . . The so-
called ‘mixed actions’ are such cases.”39 By unpredictably frustrating the choices of the
actors involved and even threatening to ruin their lives altogether, the circumstances of
mixed actions call forth the idea of bad luck as Aristotle defines it in the Physics.
Does the apparent influence of bad luck on the circumstances of mixed actions
nullify either the voluntariness of these actions or the agents’ responsibility for them? On
the contrary, in the situations of bad circumstantial luck faced by the ship’s captain and
the man threatened by the tyrant, Aristotle finds that each man “acts voluntarily, for in
fact the origin (archē) of the movement of the parts that serve as instruments in such
actions is in the person himself; and in those cases in which the origin is in the person
himself, it is also up to him to act or not to act” (NE 3.1.1110a13-18). Precisely because
38 Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility,” 284. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle himself
invokes the idea of luck in his discussion of a ship that has been blown off course,
arriving in Aegina rather than in Athens (Met. 5.30.1025a26-29).
39 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 38.
61
he does not conceive of luck as something out there in the world, Aristotle looks for more
concrete explanations of actions that elicit the idea of luck as a contingent explanation.
One such explanation lies in the origin of the action: the apparent influence of bad luck
on the circumstances of action is outweighed by the consideration that the action
originated in the agent who acted knowingly. John Cooper puts the point well: “For
Aristotle, to be responsible for an action is a clear-cut, factual matter of the action’s
origins: if it was originated by any of an agent’s desires, or a decision, taken together
with its thought, then it is voluntary and the agent is responsible for it.”40 Aristotle’s own
summary statement at the conclusion of NE 3.1 supports Cooper’s reading: “Since what
is involuntary is that which is the result of force and done on account of ignorance, what
is voluntary would seem to be something whose origin is in the person himself, who
knows the particulars that constitute the action” (NE 3.1.1111a21-24).
Scholars who attempt to find in NE 3.1 a theory of specifically moral
responsibility are troubled by Aristotle’s insistence on the voluntariness of mixed actions.
According to David Bostock, for example, “missing from the discussion is what we call
‘mitigating circumstances,’ where the agent is to be blamed, and perhaps punished, for
what he did, but the blame or punishment is to be lessened in recognition of the fact that,
in the circumstances, it would have been difficult, but not impossible, for him to have
done what is right.”41 Similarly, Terence Irwin modifies Aristotle’s theory so that the
opportunity and capacity for “effective decision” emerges as the sine qua non of moral
40 Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility,” 296.
41 Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, 107.
62
responsibility.42 By implication, on Irwin’s proto-Kantian reading of NE 3.1, whenever
luck significantly impedes on the circumstances of action, then the agent in question did
not enjoy his usual freedom to deliberate; consequently, he should not be subjected to
ethical judgment.43 Susan Sauvé Meyer makes this point explicit: for Meyer’s Aristotle,
“voluntary actions must be performed non-accidentally” insofar as voluntary actions must
display the “moral character” of the agent.44 Because Meyer also supposes that mixed
actions are performed accidentally rather than through deliberate choice, she concludes
that “it is inappropriate to blame the agent” for mixed actions.45
While Aristotle grants that no one would choose a mixed action for its own sake
(NE 3.1.1110a19), he simultaneously maintains—contra the moral responsibility
reading—that actions ostensibly influenced by bad circumstantial luck can give rise to a
range of ethical judgments, including (but not limited to) praise or blame (epainountai
and psegontai; NE 3.1.1110a20-24). Aristotle himself praises the captain who jettisons
his cargo in order to save his ship; thus the captain exhibited his intelligence (nous; NE
3.1.1110a13). Aristotle also suggests that one might praise the man threatened by the
42 See Irwin, “Reason and Responsibility,” 132, 134, 143.
43 Irwin, “Reason and Responsibility,” 143, where Irwin confirms that his reading is self-
consciously proto-Kantian: “Aristotle . . . finds the power of self-determination in the
capacity for effective decision, not in uncaused acts of will. He offers an alternative
answer to Kant’s question which avoids Kant’s libertarian metaphysics.”
44 Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility, 113-14.
45 Ibid., 117.
63
tyrant should he refuse to inform on his fellow citizens; for “people are sometimes even
praised (epainountai), whenever they endure something shameful (aischron) or painful in
return for great and noble things” (NE 3.1.1110a20-22). Conversely, Aristotle blames
Alcmaeon of Euripides’ lost play for offering the “laughable” excuse that he was
compelled to kill his mother (NE 3.1.1110a26-27). Yet, for Aristotle, mixed actions need
not give rise to praise or blame in every case. “Forgiveness” (suggnōmē) is more fitting
“whenever someone does what he ought not to do because the matters involved surpass
human nature” (NE 3.1.1110a30).46 Whereas many commentators assume that NE 3.1
outlines universal conditions of moral responsibility, Aristotle in fact adduces ordinary
judgments of praise and blame as evidence of the voluntariness of the actions that elicit
these judgments.47 What NE 3.1 contains is a theory of responsibility for actions, not a
46 Thus Bostock’s worry about mitigating circumstances misses the mark: Aristotle is not
arguing that all voluntary actions and hence all mixed actions must elicit either praise or
blame. Moreover, Aristotle’s comment on forgiveness clearly shows that the idea of
mitigation is not alien to him. In any case, the discussion of mitigating circumstances is
somewhat out of place in analysis of NE 3.1, since Aristotle does not discuss legal
responsibility or punishment in this passage.
47 For example, Furley, “Aristotle on the Voluntary,” 60: “What we find in Aristotle,
then, is . . . an insistence that there is a real distinction between voluntary and involuntary
actions, such that moral categories are relevant to the former but not to the latter.”
64
theory of moral responsibility.48 The key point made in the first half of NE 3.1 is that
mixed actions undertaken in the face of circumstances ostensibly influenced by bad luck
are voluntary, while actions wholly determined by external force are involuntary.
In the second half of NE 3.1, Aristotle goes on to examine actions that miscarry
through ignorance of the particulars that constitute the action. When an agent acts as he
acts because he lacks knowledge of an important feature of the situation through no fault
of his own, then his action is involuntary. In Aristotle’s own words: “since there may be
ignorance about all these things that constitute an action, he who is ignorant of any them
is held to have acted involuntarily” (NE 3.1.1111a15-16). Observe Aristotle’s examples
of actions motivated by ignorance of the particulars: Merope mistakes her son for the
enemy and nearly kills him; a fencer wounds his partner, not realizing that the blunt
button has fallen off his weapon; a doctor does not see that the usual remedy for an
illness will not save this patient but will kill him instead (NE 3.1.1111a10-15). To
Aristotle’s examples of involuntary actions undertaken on account of ignorance, one
could appropriately add two examples favored by Bernard Williams—that of the lorry
driver who accidentally kills a child wandering in the road, and that of Oedipus, who of
course committed multiple crimes through ignorance.49 Both unexpected and lamentable,
48 See Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility,” 265-277. The opening argument of
Cooper’s article establishes precisely this point—that Aristotle lays out a theory of
responsibility for actions.
49 Williams, Moral Luck, 28, 30; Shame and Necessity, 69.
65
actions undertaken out of ignorance of the particulars readily call forth the idea of bad
resultant luck.
One question, then, is whether Aristotle thinks that agents whose actions arise out
of ignorance of the particulars can ever be considered responsible for the lucky or
unlucky results of their actions. At first blush, Aristotle’s seems to say that every action
arising out ignorance of the particulars is involuntary. Involuntary actions of this type
contrast with the voluntary actions of vicious, drunk, or careless people, who are
somehow responsible for their ignorance (NE 3.1.1110b25-35, 3.5.1113b30-1114a2).
Whereas Plato’s Socrates argues that no one does wrong knowingly or voluntarily,
Aristotle restricts the idea of error to those who do not know what they are doing in a
particular situation.50 For Aristotle, the most important sign of involuntary as opposed to
voluntary ignorance is the agent’s own emotional response to his action after the fact:
“what is done on account of ignorance . . . is involuntary [only] when it causes the person
who acts to feel pain and regret” (akousion de to epilupon kai en metameleia; NE
3.1.1110b18-20). Pain, regret, and even “disgust” (duscherainōn) are the characteristic
emotional responses to erroneous action originating in ignorance (NE 3.1.1110b21).
Through his expression of these emotions, the agent reveals that he would not have acted
as he did if only he could have foreseen the results of his action.
How does the agent’s experience of regret indicate the involuntariness of his
action? If determining responsibility were simply a “clear-cut, factual matter of the
action’s origins,” as Cooper has argued, then the agent’s emotions ex post facto would be
50 See Plato, Prot. 345e and Laws 860d.
66
irrelevant.51 Anthony Kenny has likewise expressed confusion at the idea that “a person’s
subsequent state of mind can [reveal] whether a particular action is voluntary,
involuntary, or neither.”52 In the same breath, however, Kenny discusses a Shakespearean
example that clarifies Aristotle’s point. Having stabbed Polonius in place of Claudius,
Hamlet exults: “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! / I took thee for thy better,
take thy fortune.”53 Although his ignorance explains how Hamlet came to kill Polonius
rather than Claudius (or anyone else), one would not want to call his action involuntary,
because Hamlet delights in having performed it. The same might be said of Aristotle’s
creditor from the Physics: the creditor went to the marketplace ignorant of the fact that he
would meet his debtor there; yet, for the creditor, there is nothing involuntary about the
51 Thus Cooper’s fine reading of NE 3.1 still distorts Aristotle’s text insofar as Cooper
presents the origin of action in the agent as the sufficient condition of responsibility.
Aristotle does not simply focus on the antecedent conditions of action, on the so-called
causal picture. The agent’s responsibility for his action often emerges after the fact
through his emotional reaction; the presence or absence of regret can be a crucial signal
of responsibility. Nor does Aristotle seek to dispel debate about responsibility by offering
a reductionist and even simplistic account of the topic. He instead preserves the way in
which we speak and argue about complex particulars of human action, even as he insists
that these arguments and ambiguities do not lessen the burden of responsible action or
judgment. Cf. Cooper, “Aristotelian Responsibility,” 289-90.
52 Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will, 53.
53 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.4.32-33, cited in Kenny.
67
meeting or the recovery of the money.54 When an agent himself claims responsibility for
a lucky outcome of his own action, Aristotle sees no reason to gainsay him.55
For Aristotle, then, agents incur responsibility for their resultant good luck, which
does not give rise to regret. Does Aristotle also hold that agents are responsible for
actions issuing in bad luck, even when they act involuntarily through non-culpable
ignorance of the particulars? Would Aristotle consider Oedipus, Merope, or Williams’s
lorry driver responsible for what each has done? On the one hand, Aristotle argues that
involuntary actions deserve “pity and forgiveness” in general (NE 3.1.1111a2).
Aristotle’s account of responsibility eschews punitive severity; he nowhere suggests that
errors committed through ignorance of the particulars are legally culpable.56 On the other
hand, could it possibly be the case that Oedipus bears no responsibility for his actions?
54 Certainly the creditor did not recover his money akôn insofar as this word means,
“reluctantly.” See the discussion of ordinary notions of hekousion and akousion, hekôn
and akôn, in Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility, 9-14.
55 Hence the conceptual distinction Aristotle draws in NE 3.1: “if someone’s action was
caused by ignorance, but he now has no objection to the action, he has done it neither
voluntarily, since he did not know what it was, nor involuntarily, since he now feels no
pain. . . . let his action be ‘nonvoluntary” (ouch hekôn). For since they differ, it is better
that each have his own name” (NE 3.1.1110b20-25). Nonvoluntary actions refer to those
lucky actions motivated by ignorance of the particulars for which the agent accepts
responsibility.
56 See NE 5.8.1135a28-32.
68
According to Martha Nussbaum’s analysis of Aristotelian responsibility, Aristotle would
indeed recommend a full exoneration of Oedipus. In Nussbaum’s words: “circumstances
impeded and thwarted Oedipus’s blameless activation of his character, stepping in, so to
speak, between the intention and the act and causing the intended act to have at best a
merely shadowy existence.”57 Nussbaum goes so far as to argue that “[Oedipus] is not a
parricide, because the act that he intended and chose was not the act that we have judged
him to have performed.”58 “Bad luck” excuses Oedipus for the murder of Laius;
Nussbaum assigns this conclusion to Aristotle himself.59
Yet Aristotle’s own remarks in NE 3.1 are less clearly exculpatory of Oedipus.
Most importantly, Aristotle writes that errors committed through ignorance “must still be
painful to the person in question and done with regret” (NE 3.1.1111a20). What is the
significance of the experience of regret for evaluating responsibility for actions issuing in
unlucky outcomes? On this point, Aristotle’s influence on Williams is striking. A central
passage in Williams’s “Moral Luck” can be used to gloss Aristotle’s reflections on luck,
responsibility, and regret in NE 3.1:
57 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 333.
58 Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy,” 90.
59 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 38; Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy,” 91. See also
Yack, Problems of a Political Animal, 251-49; W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility,
105: “Even if Sophocles had the will, he had no means of acquitting Oedipus of his
unintentional crimes.” In “The Ends of Tragedy,” Simon Goldhill persuasively traces the
origins of such readings to German idealism.
69
The sentiment of agent-regret is by no means restricted to voluntary
agency. It can extend far beyond what one intentionally did to almost
anything for which one was causally responsible. . . . The lorry driver
who, through no fault of his, runs over a child, will feel differently from
any spectator. . . . We feel sorry for the driver, but that sentiment co-exists
with, indeed presupposes, that there is something special about his relation
to this happening, something which cannot merely be eliminated by the
consideration that it was not his fault. It may be still more so in cases
where agency is fuller than in such an accident, though still involuntary
through ignorance.60
Williams’s quintessentially Aristotelian point in this passage is that responsibility for
actions can extend beyond voluntariness in cases of involuntary action performed through
ignorance of the particulars. For Williams as for Aristotle, regret is not merely a feeling,
but a cognitively rich emotion that displays the doer’s unique relation to the deed.61
Involuntary though an action may be, the responsible agent recognizes that he did it and
is therefore answerable for its unlucky result, at least to himself. As regards the example
of Oedipus, consider that Aristotle holds up Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as the tragedy
par excellence precisely because of the powerful recognition (anagnōrisis) and reversal
60 Williams, Moral Luck, 28.
61 Williams, Moral Luck, 28-33. On the meaning and significance of regret in classical
antiquity, see Konstan, Before Forgiveness; Fulkerson, No Regrets.
70
(peripeteia) that structure the action of this play.62 What Oedipus comes to recognize is
that he has brought about his own reversal of fortune through his deeds: although he
committed his crimes through involuntary ignorance, and although Apollo too had a role
in these actions, Oedipus still regrets them and holds himself utterly responsible for them.
Thus the drama brings home to the audience the terrible fact that Oedipus is aitios—that
his own involuntary actions, compounded by bad resultant luck, have ruined his life.63
In this way Aristotle and Williams implicitly draw an important distinction
between voluntariness and responsibility. Sarah Broadie gestures toward this distinction
when she poses the question: “Does Aristotle mean by ‘hekōn’ one who knowingly
originates (voluntary1), or one who is answerable for (voluntary2)?”64 In my view,
Aristotle defines the agent who performs a voluntary action as one who knowingly
originates the action; the “responsible” (aitios) agent, by contrast, identifies the person
who is answerable for what he has done. Aristotle’s treatment of involuntary actions
initiated on account of ignorance of the particulars shows that agents can be responsible
for certain involuntary actions that issue in lucky or unlucky outcomes—in particular,
62 See Poetics 1452a29-1452b2, 1453b1-9; Salkever, “Tragedy and the Education of the
Dēmos,” 297.
63 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 69: “The whole of the Oedipus Tyrannus, that dreadful
machine, moves to the discovery of just one thing, that he did it. . . . In the story of one’s
life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has
intentionally done.” See also Balot, “Philosophy and ‘Humanity,’” 25-26.
64 Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 138, with emphasis in the original.
71
those actions that provoke regret. The set of responsible agents is therefore broader than
the set of actions that these same agents perform voluntarily.
Viewed as a whole, NE 3.1 offers at least three lessons about luck and
responsibility supported by the larger argument of the Nicomachean Ethics. First,
individuals should take responsibility for their actions, even when their actions result in
unlucky outcomes. Taking responsibility for one’s actions means being serious
(spoudaios) about what one has done. Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
portrays the serious person (ho spoudaios) as the person of consummate virtue, both
ethical and intellectual (e.g., NE 1.7.1098a7-15, 3.4.1113a32-34 and 10.6.1176b18-20).
For example, he writes that “the serious person is distinguished perhaps most of all by his
seeing what is true in each case, just as is if he were a rule and measure of them” (NE
3.4.1113a32-34). Aristotle contrasts seriousness to the readiness of most people to make
excuses for their bad behavior: “seeking refuge in words (ton logon katapheugontes),
[most people] suppose that they are philosophizing (oiontai philosophein) and that they
will in this way be serious (spoudaioi), thereby doing something similar to the sick who
listen attentively to their physicians but do nothing prescribed” (NE 2.4.1105b13-16). By
contrast, the serious person appreciates the weight of action, and he consequently
eschews hypocrisy, carelessness (NE 3.4-5.1113a32-1114a11), and even excessive levity
(NE 10.6.1176b34-1177a6).65
65 Collingwood’s contention that Aristotle’s portrait of ho spoudaios reflects “the
morality of the Greek gentleman” cannot account for the fact that, in Aristotle’s view, the
serious person pursues philosophical contemplation as the highest human activity.
72
Second, Aristotelian responsibility means doing voluntarily what the situation
requires, having grasped the particulars of the situation through the exercise of practical
wisdom (phronēsis). Aristotle’s treatment of mixed actions in the first half of NE 3.1
reveals the importance of practical wisdom as a guide to action in ostensibly unlucky
circumstances. Look again at the example of the ship’s captain: Aristotle comments that
“in an unqualified sense, no one voluntarily jettisons cargo . . . but when one’s own
preservation and that of the rest are at issue, everyone who has intelligence (nous) would
do it” (NE 3.1.1110a9-11). The captain made an intelligent decision to jettison the cargo;
the appearance of bad luck in the form of the storm made this action necessary.
In NE 1.10, Aristotle explicitly elaborates this lesson about luck and practical
wisdom. In his own words, “someone who is truly good and sensible bears up under all
kinds of luck (pasas tas tuchas) in a becoming way and always does what is noblest
given the circumstances, just as a good general makes use, with the greatest military skill,
of the army he has” (NE 1.10.1100b37-1101a4). Like the general, the pilot, or any other
expert craftsman, the person of practical wisdom locates an “opportune” (kairos) course
of action even and especially in unlucky circumstances (NE 2.2.1104a9-10). In fact, the
Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, 229; Lindsay, “Aristotle’s Appraisal of Manly Spirit,”
442; cf. Mara, “Interrogating the Identities of Excellence,” 307. Mara’s response to
Collingwood—that “Aristotle treats the identity of ho spoudaios not as a premise
supporting systematic moral theory but as an ongoing question”—faces the same problem
for the opposite reason: whereas Collingwood thinks that ho spoudaios refers to the
Greek gentlemen, Mara thinks that it does not refer to any one human-type.
73
general’s excellence may never be so brilliant as when he leads his troops to victory
despite being outnumbered and hemmed in by the enemy; similarly, when the ship’s
captain recognizes the necessity of jettisoning his cargo, he demonstrates his excellence
in piloting. Thus “intelligence in matters of action grasps the ultimate particular thing
(tou eschatou) that admits of being otherwise” (NE 6.11.1143b1-2)—that is, the various
contingencies of circumstance that inevitably arise in the domain of praxis.66
A third lesson follows from the second: it makes no sense simply to rely on good
luck or to succumb to bad luck, since the very meaning of good or bad luck can vary with
the virtue (or lack thereof) of the agent. Aristotle writes that when “even good luck, when
in excess, acts as an impediment—and perhaps it is not just to call this ‘good luck’
(eutuchian) any longer, for its definition (horos) is relative to flourishing” (pros gar tēn
eudaimonian; NE 7.13.1153b23-25). Because the so-called goods of fortune will entice
vicious or even akratic individuals to act in greedy or pleasure-seeking ways, the goods
of fortune will not be good for them (Pol. 7.13.1332a20-24). Conversely, the person of
practical wisdom will find opportunities to display his excellence in the face of
circumstances that many people might regard as bad luck (NE 1.10.1100b30-32).67 Hence
Aristotle’s fondness for Agathon’s quip: “art loves luck, and luck art” (technē tuchēn
esterxe kai tuchē technēn; NE 6.4.1140a20). Aristotle uses this quotation to point toward
66 See Beiner, Political Judgment, 73.
67 For these reasons, it would be too simple to argue that virtuous activity depends on the
presence of the goods of fortune in Aristotle’s own view. Cf. Kenny, Aristotle on the
Perfect Life, 84; Cooper, “Aristotle on the Goods of Fortune,” 184.
74
a Machiavellian paradox: for the virtuous, bad luck can be good luck. For example, in
Aristotle’s view, the virtue of courage characteristically manifests itself in situations of
extreme risk—situations that many might characterize as unlucky (NE 3.8.1117a18-22).68
To be sure, Aristotle affirms that at the limit serious misfortune can destroy
human flourishing. This hardheaded insight explains the fundamental distinction Aristotle
draws between flourishing and virtue. While cultivation of virtue is necessary for
flourishing, virtue nevertheless “appears to be rather incomplete. For it seems to be
possible for someone to possess virtue . . . while suffering badly and undergoing the
greatest misfortunes (kakopathein kai atuchein ta megista). But no one would say that
such a person flourishes, unless he were defending a thesis” (NE 1.5.1095b35-1096a2).
The situation of Priam admits of no redemptive interpretation: whatever the more precise
explanations of the fall of Troy, Aristotle does not quibble with the common-sense view
that the bad luck ruined Priam’s life, full stop: “nobody deems happy someone who deals
with luck (tuchais) of that sort and comes to a wretched end” (NE 1.9.1100a8-9).
Note, however, that while Aristotle acknowledges that bad luck may disrupt
human flourishing, he maintains that luck cannot transform virtue into vice. True,
Nussbaum has argued that, for Aristotle, “interference from the world leaves no self-
68 See Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 321. Cf. Salkever, Finding the Mean, 79:
“bad luck or other pressures may prevent a courageous person from actually doing
courageous deeds.” It is interesting that Salkever chooses the courageous person to make
this point: paradoxically, the courageous person might consider it bad luck to live in a
time of peace!
75
sufficient kernel of the person safely intact. It strikes directly at the root of goodness
itself.”69 But Aristotle himself contends, unequivocally, that virtue resists corruption,
“since [the virtuous human being] will never do things that are hateful and base” (NE
1.10.1101a1); conversely, “no one is just or moderate by luck or through luck” (dikaios
d’ oudeis oude sōphrōn apo tuchēs oude dia tēn tuchēn estin; Pol. 7.1.1323b28-29). “To
entrust the greatest and noblest thing to luck would be excessively discordant” (NE
1.9.11099b24), in Aristotle’s view, because luck does not exist in the way that virtue
exists, or even in the way that the gods may exist. Not luck itself but the belief in luck is
the crucial phenomenon for Aristotle.
Luck, Statesmanship, and Legislation in the Politics
In the Politics, as in the Physics and the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers precise
explanations of outcomes that many would explain as resulting from good or bad luck.
For example, Aristotle shows that while a sudden change in the regime may appear to
have arisen through sheer luck, it is possible to identify precise origins and explanations
of such a transformation (Pol. 5.3.1302b34-1303a13). On the Aristotelian account, the
appearance of luck masks underlying political realities that the extraordinary political
actor should attempt to understand and to take in hand. Aristotle’s deflationary account of
69 Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 381. See also Yack, Problems of a Political Animal,
257-58: “human capacities are not chosen or in our control. . . . When we say that
[human goodness] is praiseworthy, we are praising something that fortune, so to speak,
has given us.” Finally, Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 77-79.
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luck can therefore be seen as part of his pedagogical project in the practical books of the
Politics—to educate the “practical wisdom” of “the good legislator and the true
statesmen,” the individuals to whom he addresses his “science of the regime” (Pol.
4.1.1288b21-1289a13).70
Moreover, in the Politics, as in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle combines a
deflationary approach to the idea of luck with an expansive conception of responsibility.
As we will see, Aristotle attributes the health or sickness of the regime to the actions of
its legislators and statesmen above all (e.g, Pol. 7.14.1333b37-39). Yet Aristotle also
reveals a disproportion between the responsibility of the political leader to improve the
regime and the unpredictable and largely uncontrollable circumstances or events that
might seem to shape the regime by themselves. The common-sense idea of luck retains a
central place in Aristotelian political thought: although invocations of luck tend toward
imprecision and reification in Aristotle’s own view, he uses this idea to illuminate many
of the risks and uncertainties shouldered by the political leader.
Aristotle’s discussion of stasis and regime change in the fifth book of the Politics
exemplifies his approach to the topic of luck in politics.71 Ryan Balot and Arlene
70 I see no reason to assert a fundamental cleavage separating the practical books from the
rest of the Politics.
71 What exactly is the meaning of stasis? “As Moses I. Finley notes simply and
forcefully, stasis refers etymologically only to a position; that the position should become
a party, that a party should be constituted for the purpose of sedition, that one faction
should always call forth another, and that civil war should then rage is a semantic
77
Saxonhouse each have shown that Aristotle identifies injustice, whether real or perceived,
as the fundamental explanation of stasis (Pol. 5.1.1301a26-38).72 Regimes that embody
unjust distributive principles fuel greed for honor and gain. Especially in extreme
oligarchies and democracies, the powerful plunder those excluded from the regime,
spurring the oppressed to factionalize in turn (Pol. 5.5.1304b20-1305a8, 5.5.1305b40-42;
NE 8.10.1160b12-16). Alongside this general account, Aristotle lays out ten proximate
origins of stasis (Pol. 5.2.1302a39-1302b5).73 One such origin is “disproportionate
evolution whose interpretation should be sought not ‘in philology but in Greek society
itself.’ I would add that it should also be sought in Greek thought about the city. . . .”
Nicole Loraux, The Divided City, 24. Cf. M.I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient
Greece, 94; Balot, Greed and Injustice, 189-233; Josiah Ober, Athenian Legacies, 88-90,
172-73; Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, 118; Marcus Wheeler, “Aristotle’s Analysis
of the Nature of Political Struggle,” 161-63.
72 Balot, Greed and Injustice, 47-49; Saxonhouse, “Aristotle on the Corruption of
Regimes.”
73 The following are the ten proximate origins of stasis according to Aristotle: “For men
are stirred up (parochunontai) against one another by profit and by honor—not in order
to acquire them for themselves, as was said earlier, but because they see others
aggrandizing (pleonektountas) themselves (whether justly or unjustly) with respect to
these things. They are stirred up further by hubris, by fear, by preeminence (huperchēn),
by contempt (kataphronēsin), by disproportionate growth (dia auxēsin tēn para to
analogon), and further, though in another manner, by electioneering (eritheian), by
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growth” of a part of the regime (Pol. 5.2.1302b3). Strikingly, Aristotle says that
disproportionate growth “sometimes occurs through luck” (dia tuchas; Pol.
5.3.1303a2).74 Reviewing wars undertaken by Argos, Tarentum, and Athens, including
the so-called Peloponnesian War, Aristotle finds that the ranks of the few were
unexpectedly diminished in these cities; consequently, the people factionalized and
pushed these regimes in more democratic directions (Pol. 5.3.1303a2-6).75 For the
[neglect of] small things, and by dissimilarity” (Pol 5.2.1302a39-1302b5). Following
Keyt, I translate “di’ eritheian” as “electioneering”; Lord has “underestimation.” But I
follow Lord in bracketing “di’ oligōrian” (negligence) because Aristotle always links
“negligence” to the following element, i.e., “small things”: “negligence” is of “small
things.” See, for example, Pol 5.4.1303b27-31 and 5.8.1308a34. This move yields ten
proximate origins of stasis—an important result, we will see, since Aristotle also
proposes ten strategies of preservation. For critical perspectives on these ten triggers, see
Balot, Greed and Injustice, 47; Garver, Aristotle’s Politics, 141-44; Kalimtzis, Aristotle
on Political Enmity, 157-78; Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, 122-25; Saxonhouse,
“Aristotle on the Corruption of Regimes,” 191; Weed, Aristotle on Stasis, 118.
74 Newman remarks that “the tuchai refered to [in this passage] would not have escaped
notice.” See Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, vol. 4, 303.
75 “Events at Tarentum are dated to 473, those at Argos to 494, and those at Athens to the
Peloponnesian War of 431-403, or to its first part, the Archidamian War of 431-421.”
Simpson, A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle, 374.
79
people, the losses incurred by the few might have seemed to be strokes of great good
luck, while the few might have seen themselves as the victims of serious misfortune.
One wonders, though, whether Aristotle needs to mention luck in this context.
Does he not offer, at the same time, a determinate explanation of regime change through
growth of a part? Argos, Tarentum, and Athens suffered military defeats that
fundamentally altered each regime’s socio-political composition. As a direct result of
these setbacks on the battlefield, the many became increasingly preponderant and
powerful in each regime. But whatever the Athenian elites may have felt about their
losses over the course of the war with Sparta, for example, it remains unclear why they
should have viewed these losses as unlucky rather than as merely lamentable. In fact,
Aristotle goes on to suggest that each proximate cause of regime change, including
“growth of a part,” can be predicted and perhaps controlled by the extraordinary political
actor. In Aristotle’s own words: “if we have an understanding of the things that destroy
[regimes], we will also have an understanding of the things that preserve them; for
opposites are productive of opposite things, and destruction is the opposite of
preservation” (Pol. 5.8.1307b27-30). Just as Aristotle outlines ten proximate origins of
stasis and regime-change, so too he outlines ten strategies of preservation (Pol.
5.8.1307b30-1309a30)—much as Hobbes offers three “passions that incline men to
peace” to counterpoise the “three principal causes of quarrel” rooted in human nature.76
76 Hobbes, Leviathan, 76-78. See also Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, 136; Nichols,
Citizens and Statesman, 101: “the remedy that Aristotle suggests against such a change in
the regime is to counter the more extreme tendencies by opposite measures.”
80
By implication, then, regime change does not happen by luck, thought it may appear to
do so to those who have not been schooled in Aristotelian political science.
True, Aristotle does not establish a straightforward, one-to-one correspondence
between the origins of destruction and those of preservation.77 Preventing regime change
through growth of a part could involve promoting fears, tightening or relaxing property
assessments, and educating citizens to regime-specific virtues, for example (Pol.
5.8.1307b30-1309a30). Precisely because there exists no method of preservation, the
extraordinary political actor will need to pursue a prudent program of reform, employing
Aristotle’s advice in contextually appropriate ways. Aristotle himself announces that the
overarching purpose of the practical books of the Politics is to inculcate “practical
wisdom” (phronēsis; Pol. 4.1.1289a13) in “the good legislator and the true statesman”
(ton agathon nomothetēn kai ton hōs alēthōs politikon; Pol. 4.1.1288b27).78 Previous
inquiries into the regime, Aristotle suggests, were not “useful” (chrēsimos; Pol.
4.1.1288b37) because they focused on the best regime without at the same time attending
to the political realities that must concern the prudent political leader. While Aristotle
also maintains that the “science” (epistēmē; Pol. 4.1.1388b22) of the regime should be
oriented toward the best, as all sciences take their bearings from what is “naturally the
finest” (tō . . . kallista pephukoti; Pol. 4.1.1288b14), he simultaneously argues that
political leaders should study the complete spectrum of political realities, including the
77 Garver, Aristotle’s Politics, 145.
78 See Salkever, Finding the Mean, esp. 101, 161; and NE 6.8.1141b: “the political art
(politikē) and practical wisdom (phronēsis) are the same characteristic.”
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rare and destructive. Aristotle’s “science of the regime” thus reveals various
circumstances and events that might seem to constitute good or bad luck for the regime,
but which the extraordinary political actor will perceive, less mystically, as occasions for
prudent leadership.
At this point, one might object: if Aristotle invites the political leader to take a
skeptical view of luck and to trust in his practical wisdom, then why does he invoke the
idea of luck at all in the Politics? For example, Eugene Garver worries that if Aristotle
were to identify “fortune” as a significant cause of “constitutional change,” then “we
might have the consolations of history, but Aristotelian practical science would be
impossible”; for in that case the regime itself would be the plaything of luck.79 One
possible reply to Garver is that while Aristotle does not identify luck as a cause of regime
change, he still wants to preserve the quotidian idea of luck in the Politics. Remember the
Physics: although Aristotle criticizes the widespread reification of luck as something “out
there,” he simultaneously affirms the felt-experience of the lucky or unlucky event—its
power to save a life or to destroy one. This commonplace view of luck might be
especially useful for thinking about politics. For example, Aristotle’s treatment of stasis
in Book 5 depicts an array of unforeseen crises that have the capacity to precipitate
regime change. In addition to regime change through growth of a part, Aristotle depicts
and analyzes private squabbles among elites—over a love affair, for instance, as
happened at Syracuse (Pol. 5.4.1303b21-27)—that can unexpectedly light the fuse of
79 Garver, Aristotle’s Politics, 144.
82
stasis and thereby produce a change in the regime.80 Although luck is not a cause of
political change in its own right, it nonetheless makes sense that the idea of luck looms
large in the minds of democratic or oligarchic partisans who find their political lives
shockingly upended through a change in the regime that brings them either prosperity or
mortal danger.
Another explanation of Aristotle’s invocations of luck in the Politics is that at a
certain level of generality political life is, paradoxically, predictably unpredictable.81 On
this point, consider Aristotle’s frequent mentions of the idea of luck in his elaboration of
the best regime. Founding the best regime would require the concomitant realization of
many unlikely circumstances; whether the founder will have access to the right kind of
citizen body or the right kind of territory, for example, defies prediction or control, at
least in part (Pol. 7.4.1325b38-1326a9). For Aristotle, “speaking about [these
contingencies] is a matter of prayer (euchēs ergon esti), having them come about, a
matter of luck” (sumbēnai tuchēs; Pol. 7.12.1331b20-22). Aristotle joins Plato’s Athenian
Stranger in supposing that the art of legislation cannot altogether master the
circumstances and events that many people would call lucky or unlucky:
I was about to say that no human being ever legislates anything, but that
luck and accidents of every sort, occurring in all kinds of ways, legislate
everything for us. Either it’s some war that violently overturns regimes
80 This example evokes the Athenian tyrannicides and Thucydides’ comments on that
episode, which I take up in Chapter 4.
81 See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 93-101.
83
and transforms laws, or it’s the baffling impasse of harsh poverty that does
it. Diseases, too, make many innovations necessary, when epidemics occur
and bad weather comes and frequently lasts many years. If he looked
ahead to all these things, someone might be eager to say what I just said—
that no mortal ever legislates anything, but that almost all human affairs
are matters of luck.82
To be clear, neither the Athenian Stranger nor Aristotle says in his own name that
luck legislates everything. Aristotle writes that “we pray for the [best] city to be well
founded . . . in the matters over which luck (tuchē) has control (kuria), but the city’s
being excellent is ultimately not the work of luck, but of knowledge and choice” (ouketi
tuchēs ergon all’ epistēmēs kai prohairseōs; Pol. 7.13.1332a31-34). Yet both Aristotle
and Plato suggest that no statesman chooses his emergency, no founder his time and
place. Nor can leaders know whether their actions will have lasting effects. The
Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians reminds the reader that the regime laid down
by Solon gave way to the Peisistratid tyranny (Ath. Pol. 13-14). Thus the extraordinary
political actor seems to be vulnerable to the apparent influence of luck on both the
circumstances and the results of his actions. Although there must exist more precise
explanations of these circumstances and events, Aristotle locates in common opinion a
wise appreciation of the chanciness of politics.
What is the practical import of these reflections on luck’s place in political life?
Some commentators have supposed that Aristotle’s reflections on luck imply a
82 Plato, Laws 709a-b (trans. Pangle).
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conservative stance toward political reform. In particular, since “luck has control” over
the circumstances and materials necessary for founding the best regime, these things are
unlikely to be available unless the regime orients itself toward acquisition. But an
acquisitive regime will necessarily fall short of the best regime, which aims instead at
human flourishing through the cultivation of virtue. Mary Nichols concludes that “the
conditions necessary for political rule make its full flourishing impossible.”83 On
Nichols’s reading, by eschewing the quixotic and self-defeating project of overcoming
luck through the acquisition of the equipment necessary for the cultivation of virtue,
Aristotle orients his political science toward the preservation of extant regimes. For
similar reasons, Thomas Pangle concludes that “Aristotle’s therapeutic political science
comes to sight as having a strongly conservative aim.”84
No doubt, Aristotle offers extensive advice on the preservation of regimes,
including tyrannical regimes, which he himself regards as the worst of all regimes (Pol.
6.11.1313a18-1315b10). Even so, Aristotle assigns to the statesman and the legislator a
remarkably high degree of responsibility to improve the regime as much as possible
within the limits imposed by the materials and circumstances at hand. Aristotle nowhere
83 Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen, 164. For a similarly Platonic reading of the
Aristotelian best regime, see Salkever, “Whose Prayer?” Cf. Depew, “Politics, Music,
and Contemplation”; Ober, Political Dissent, 347-51.
84 Pangle, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics, 170. See also Yack, Problems of a
Political Animal, 275; Miller, Jr., Nature, Justice, and Rights, 306; Polansky, “Aristotle
on Political Change,” 331, n. 19; Weed, Aristotle on Stasis, 213.
85
suggests that the extraordinary political actor might reasonably point to the influence of
bad luck on the circumstances or the effects of his actions for the purpose of excusing
either his regime’s ills or his own failure to remedy them. On the contrary, Aristotle’s
reflections on the uncertainties and risks endemic to politics sit side-by-side with his
expansive account of the responsibilities of the political leader. Like the man threatened
by the tyrant and the ship’s captain of NE 3.1, the political leader is responsible for acting
in the face of exigent circumstances that might seem to be influenced by bad luck.
More concretely, Aristotle argues that it is the responsibility of the legislator to set
the telos and therewith the ēthos of the regime. A regime that aims to dominate (to
kratein; Pol. 2.9.1271b2, 7.14.1333b14) other cities in war, such as Sparta, will educate
its own citizens to “attempt to pursue the capability to dominate [their] own city” (Pol.
7.14.1333b31-2)—that is, to regard tyranny as the best way of life, either consciously or
unconsciously. But Aristotle thinks “the same things are best for men both privately and
in common, and the legislator should implant (empoiein) these in the souls of human
beings” (Pol. 7.14.1333b37-39). In addition, the legislator or statesman should enact laws
that resist the regime’s self-destruction through extremism. For example, while an
oligarchic regime such as Carthage may appear to flourish “through luck,” since the
regime happened to enrich the people and thereby to satisfy them, “they ought to be free
of factional conflict through the legislator” (Pol. 2.11.1273b20-22). So too the statesman
should intervene in unfolding political events; “for to recognize an ill as it arises in the
beginning belongs not to any chance person (tou tuchontos) but rather to a statesman”
(politikou andros; Pol. 5.8.1308a33-34). On the Aristotelian account, then, regimes
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require wise founders and active statesmen who will take responsibility for the regime by
anticipating and responding to political contingencies through legislation and reform.85
Aristotle’s treatment of luck in politics therefore clarifies a productive tension that
runs throughout the argument of this chapter. On the one hand, Aristotle suggests that the
political leader should regard luck as a superficial concept: underneath the appearance of
lucky or unlucky circumstances or events lie the true origins and explanations of political
change; these the political leader should grasp through the exercise of practical wisdom.
85 Legislators and statesmen play key roles in Aristotle’s Athēnaiôn Politeia. See the
discussion of Solon in Kalimtzis, Aristotle on Political Enmity, 135-38, and the
discussion of Theramenes in Frank and Monoson, “Aristotle’s Theramenes at Athens,”
29-40. More important, I think it would be difficult to deny that Aristotle himself aims to
educate statesmen and especially legislators in both the Nicomachean Ethics and the
Politics. As regards the Politics, see the passages to which I refer in this paragraph, in
addition to the catalogue of legislators at 2.12.1273b28-1274b28 and the many mentions
of the legislator in Books 7-8. As regards the Nicomachean Ethics, see especially NE
1.13.1102a7 and 10.9.1180b20-30. On this point, I depart from Jill Frank, who presents
the legislator as a “deus ex machina” to which “moderns” such as Machiavelli and
Rousseau characteristically recur in order to explain how a polity obtains good
institutions or a good character. See Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 11. While it is
true that, for Aristotle, “a city is excellent . . . through its citizens” (Pol. 7.13.1332a33),
Aristotle also expects extraordinary political actors to define excellence for their
respective cities and to preserve their cities through prudent statesmanship.
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Because luck does not determine or prevent political action in the manner of compulsion
or divine intervention, Aristotle holds the political leader responsible for his own
attempts to improve the regime—even though no statesman will fully predict or control
the circumstances or the effects of his actions. In both the Nicomachean Ethics and the
Politics, Aristotle twins his skeptical and deflationary account of luck with an expansive
approach to questions of responsibility for actions. The statesman and the legislator, if
anyone, will need to embody the characteristics of practical wisdom and seriousness that
Aristotle extols as essential to responsible agency in the Nicomachean Ethics.
On the other hand, rather than jettison the common-sense idea of luck altogether,
Aristotle preserves it and even foregrounds it. In the Politics, this move allows Aristotle
to do justice to the political experience of the ordinary citizen, whose status as a citizen,
not to mention his very life, may seem to hang on lucky or unlucky events, such as an
unexpected defeat on the battlefield that precipitates regime change. Preserving the
ordinary idea of luck also brings home to the political leader the risks and uncertainties
that attend upon transformative political action: legislators and statesmen will confront
the limits of human foresight and control when they attempt to found or improve regimes
in lasting ways.
Yet Aristotle’s reflections on luck, responsibility, and politics leave many
questions unanswered. What would it mean, more concretely, for a political leader to be
both serious and prudent in the face of ostensible misfortune? How does the political
leader acquire the virtues necessary to withstand apparent bad luck in the first place?
Could it be the case that the realization of these virtues is a matter of luck? One may also
wonder whether the political leader can or should attempt to imprint his virtue onto the
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regime: would such an education take, assuming that the people are more likely to reify
luck, if not to associate it with the divine? In the next chapter, I turn to the profound and
provocative treatment of these questions found in the political thought of Machiavelli.
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CHAPTER 3: LUCK AND CHARACTER
IN MACHIAVELLI’S POLITICAL THOUGHT
I have argued the case for the presence of a skeptical and deflationary approach to luck in
the political thought of Aristotle. By contrast, the presence of such an approach in
Machiavelli’s thought is well-known. Although his predecessors and contemporaries had
extensively considered questions of luck, virtue, and character, Victoria Kahn has shown
that Machiavelli put to his own purposes the Quattrocento humanist treatment of fortune
and virtue.1 Whereas the humanists had extolled the Ciceronian and Christian virtues as
remedies for both good and bad fortune, Machiavelli denied that the world was ordered
either by a hierarchy of natural ends or by the providential will of the Christian God.2 By
abstracting God from politics, and by presenting human nature as oriented toward the
acquisition of external goods such as power and glory, Machiavelli was led to redefine
1 See Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 18-24, 32, 38. Kahn’s is the most
comprehensive and persuasive account of Machiavelli’s critique of the Renaissance
humanists. See also Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, 3-30; and Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman,
esp. 18-19, 143-44, 153. Even Gilbert acknowledges that none of Machiavelli’s
contemporaries explored so doggedly and precisely the relation of virtue to fortune; see
his Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners, 206. For an interpretation that more or less
reconciles Machiavelli to his civic-humanist milieu, see Skinner, The Foundations of
Modern Political Thought.
2 On this point, see Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” 37; Wolin, Politics and
Vision, 2nd ed., 201.
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virtue as efficacious power.3 This redefinition in itself illustrates how profoundly
Machiavelli had already departed from Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and mediaeval
Christian paradigms, according to which virtue was intrinsically noble and choiceworthy,
even if it did not always constitute a bulwark against the ravages of fortune.4
But how far, in Machiavelli’s view, did the efficacious power of virtù extend—
even to the character of the virtuoso himself? A number of scholarly authorities insist that
Machiavelli ascribes to the man of virtue the capacity to shape both his own nature and
those of his fellows freely and at will.5 In fact, though, Machiavelli’s thought on the
dynamic relation between virtue and fortune is shot-through with a surprising number of
apparent inconsistencies, compromises, and ambiguities. On the one hand, Machiavelli
reveals and recommends technologies of political power that promise to deliver to
virtuous princes and republics the goods of fortune that they desire. On the other hand,
Machiavelli also attends to the fateful and often controlling presence of fortuna in our
political lives, and even in the constitution of the character of the virtuous prince. This
chapters aims to do justice to both the optimistic and the pessimistic sides of
3 See Fischer, “Machiavelli’s Rapacious Republicanism,” xxxv.
4 See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 234-69; and Newell, “How Original Is
Machiavelli?,” 617-38.
5 See, for example, Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, 167; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s
Virtue, 36-38; McIntosh, “The Modernity of Machiavelli,” 190; Newell, Tyranny, 303-34;
Strauss, Thoughts Machiavelli, 252-53, 297-98.
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Machiavelli’s thought on the topic of fortune, though it focuses on the latter, which has
received short-shrift in the critical literature.6
In particular, I argue that the character of the virtuous Machiavellian prince arises
out of a complex and contingent series of events and experiences that Machiavelli
himself associates with the idea of fortune. This argument challenges head-on the view of
the Machiavellian prince as a wholly self-made man. Equally important, whereas notable
republican and democratic interpreters of Machiavelli suggest that Machiavelli’s Rome
succeeded, to the greatest extent possible, in overcoming “time and change” and in
making an “escape from fortuna,” I show that the civic education identified by
Machiavelli as a chief source of Rome’s resiliency was likewise influenced by fortune.7
To be sure, these are deep and paradoxical incongruities and tensions in Machiavelli’s
political thought. But perhaps the fractures belong to political reality itself rather than to
6 Multiple commentators have called Machiavelli’s political vision comic. See Lord, “On
Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” 807; Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 285, 292. Of course,
Machiavelli wrote comedies, not tragedies. Machiavelli did, however, sign his letters:
“Niccolò Machiavelli, istorico, comico e tragico.” See Wolin, Politics and Vision, 187;
Plato, Symposium 223d.
7 These phrases are drawn from Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 190. McCormick has
modified Pocock’s republican reading of Machiavelli to accommodate egalitarianism and
democracy. See McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy; and more importantly, for the
purposes of this chapter, McCormick, “Addressing the Political Exception,” 888-900. Cf.
Zuckert, “Machiavelli’s Democratic Republic” 262-94.
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Machiavelli alone. Either way, examining questions of human agency and contingency in
the company of the Florentine will shed light both on the questions themselves and on his
political vision.
I begin by revisiting the problematic relation of virtue to fortune in The Prince. If
there is anything novel to say about this well-worn theme, it is that the prince of virtù is
vulnerable, both extrinsically and intrinsically, to fortuna. For Machiavelli, the prince’s
inability fully to control his character gives rise to a grave political problem—the
problem of succession. Machiavelli’s analysis of this problem leads us to his other
masterwork, the Discourses on Livy. In the Discorsi, Machiavelli seems to say that the
republic is superior to the principality because the republic contains a deep pool of
potential leaders, whose diverse natures may be matched to the diverse external
contingencies faced by the republic over time. What he shows us, however, is that the
republic, no less than the prince, is vulnerable to luck. Yet Machiavelli’s hardheaded
acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of contingency does not issue in tragic
resignation. The depiction in the Discourses of the Roman re-founder Marcus Furius
Camillus suggests that a leader who learns in adversity the necessity of prudent self-
reliance can teach the republic to imitate his virtue.
However, two questions remain. First, where and how does the republican re-
founder arise in the first place? Is his arrival a matter of luck, similar to the appearance of
a god among mortals? Second, Machiavelli seems to argue that the re-founder ought to
follow Camillus, who cultivates a quasi-Stoical indifference to fortune in order to acquire
precisely those goods of fortune—in particular, power and glory—that the Stoics
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disdained. The conclusion of the chapter will consider the significance of this paradox,
which modern political thought inherits from Machiavelli.
Luck and Character in The Prince
The question of the individual’s vulnerability to luck lies at the heart of the controversy
surrounding Machiavelli’s legacy. Many interpreters argue that Machiavelli’s legacy
extends beyond republican political thought and practice to the birth of Enlightenment
science and modern technology. “Hidden in Machiavelli’s writings,” writes Roger D.
Masters, “is the proposal that humans use natural science and technical expertise to
imitate the creative power of the Judeo-Christian God.”8 According to Waller Newell,
Machiavelli’s proposal for the conquest of nature can be seen in the virtue he ascribes to
his greatest princes. Newell defines virtue as a “godlike power for the transformation of
human nature and the natural environment.”9 In addition, Newell writes that the virtue of
Machiavelli’s new prince makes possible “an expression of power so perfect that it
ranges far beyond mere personal triumph to the imposition of epoch making new modes
and orders.”10 On Newell’s interpretation, then, the prince is invulnerable to luck, since
his virtue masters even nature and history.
In my view, Newell’s definition of virtue as unimpeded mastery exaggerates the
effectiveness of virtue while diminishing its usefulness as a guide to action. For if virtue
8 Masters, Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power, 209.
9 Newell, Tyranny, 303.
10 Ibid., 334.
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describes the successful overcoming of whatever conditions stand in the way of the
prince’s striving, then virtue always carries success in its train, while success always
betokens virtue. As Kahn has noted, Machiavelli himself ascribes this view of virtue not
to the prudent prince, but rather to the ignorant many.11 In Machiavelli’s own words: “For
the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in the world
there is no one but the vulgar” (P 18).12 To suppose, with the people, that every good
outcome reflects efficacious human agency is to forget that success sometimes occurs as
a consequence of dumb luck. But Machiavelli is at pains to define, precisely, the relation
of virtue to luck.
More importantly, Machiavelli’s examples reveal the vulnerability of the prince to
contingencies of circumstance. The nineteenth chapter of the first book of the Discourses
supports this point: “[the prince] who is like Numa will hold [the state] or not hold it as
the times or fortune turn under him, but he who is like Romulus, and like him comes
armed with prudence and with arms, will hold it in every mode unless it is taken from
him by an obstinate and excessive force” (D 1.19.4). Even Romulus, whom Machiavelli
counts among the four greatest princes, might have been deprived of his state “by an
11 Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 38-9. See also Garver, “Machiavelli’s Prince: A
Neglected Rhetorical Classic,” 101.
12 I cite The Prince and the Discourses on Livy according to the standard fashion (by
work, book, chapter, and paragraph), and I inlay references in the text. I follow the
Mansfield translation of The Prince and the Mansfield-Tarcov translation of the
Discourses.
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obstinate and excessive force” (cf. P 6). Consider, too, the nineteenth chapter of The
Prince, in which Machiavelli discusses the death of the Roman emperor Caracalla at the
hands of a mere centurion: “Here it is to be noted that deaths such as these, which follow
from the decision of an obstinate spirit, cannot be avoided by princes because anyone
who does not care about death can hurt him; but the prince may well fear them less
because they are very rare” (P 6). Whether an individual is a Romulus or a Caracalla, an
“armed prophet” or an inept hereditary prince, his life may be ruined by an accident that
could not have been predicted or prevented.13
External contingencies form an indelible feature of “the Machiavellian cosmos”:14
“In all human things he who examines well sees this: that one inconvenience can never
be suppressed without another’s cropping up” (D 1.6.3; see also 1.37.1, 3.37.1; P 21).15 It
13 See also D 3.6.19: even though Machiavelli observes that conspiracies led by
republican generals are the most likely to succeed, he still maintains that these
conspiracies “have had various outcomes according to fortune” (D 3.6.19).
14 The reference is to the title of Anthony Parel’s book.
15 Machiavelli’s works are rife with similar statements about the instability of fortuna.
For example, see D 3.37.1: “It appears that in the actions of men, as we have discoursed
of another time, besides the other difficulties in wishing to bring a thing to its perfection,
one finds close to the good there is always some evil that arises with that good so easily
that appears impossible to be able to miss the one if one wishes for the other. One sees
this in all the things that men work on. So the good is acquired only with difficulty unless
you are aided by fortune, so that with its force it conquers this ordinary and natural
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is not surprising, therefore, that Machiavelli’s conception of virtue is suited to a world in
which external contingencies are pervasive. For Machiavelli, contingencies of
circumstance occasion the exercise of virtue. Hannah Arendt explains: “Virtù is the
response, summoned up by man, to the world, or rather to the constellation of fortuna in
which the world opens up, presents and offers itself to him, to his virtù. There is no virtù
without fortuna and no fortuna without virtù.”16
Whether virtù itself may be shaped by fortuna is, however, a problem that has not
been explored in depth. The few commentators who have discussed the prince’s internal
vulnerability to luck—among them Eugene Garver and Gennaro Sasso—do not recognize
that Machiavelli himself offers a careful and extended treatment of the problem.17 In the
inconvenience.” See also D 1.37.1; P 21; McCormick, “Addressing the Political
Exception,” 888-900; Wootton, “From Fortune to Feedback,” 25; Lukes, “Fortune Comes
of Age,” 34-35. As Lukes makes clear, acknowledging the importance of contingencies
of circumstance in Machiavelli’s thought does not mean positing fortune as something
“out there” in the world.
16 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 137.
17 For example, Garver thinks that the “destructive achievement of chapter 25”—i.e.,
“Machiavelli’s necessary but incoherent demand that one choose a character”—renders
Machiavelli’s treatment of luck and character in The Prince ultimately incoherent. See
Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, 117-121. Similarly, Sasso, in an
important passage that has been translated by McCanles, writes that fortune describes
“human nature itself . . . that dark and non virtuosa zone of character, which every man,
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first paragraph of “The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca,” for example, Machiavelli
notes that most virtuous individuals have been afflicted by serious misfortune: “Those
who consider it, my dearest Zanobi and Luigi, think it wonderful that all, or the larger
part, of those who have done very great things, and who have been excellent among the
men of their era, have in their birth and origin been humble and obscure, or at least have
been beyond all measure afflicted by Fortune.”18 Possibly, at least, it is merely
coincidental that the exemplary political figures to whom Machiavelli refers in this
passage have experienced prior misfortune on a significant scale.
Yet the sixth chapter of The Prince suggests a closer causal relationship and
thereby transforms this connection into a paradox. Somehow the extraordinary political
actor must experience bad luck in order to become virtuous. Could it be that bad luck is
actually good luck insofar as bad luck occasions the development of a naturally talented
character in the direction of virtue? To be sure, Machiavelli defines virtue in this chapter
as self-reliance in contradistinction to deference to fortune: “he who has relied less on
fortune has maintained himself more” (P 6). Machiavelli also insists that his four
exemplary princes—Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus, not to mention the “lesser
example” of Hiero of Syracuse—did not have “anything else from fortune than the
opportunity, which gave them the matter enabling them to introduce any form they
even the most prudent and virtuoso, contains necessarily within himself.” Cf. Sasso,
Niccolò Machiavelli, 395-96; McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe, 131-32.
18 Trans. Gilbert. Machiavelli, “Life of Castruccio,” 533. Strauss confirms that fortune is
a leitmotif of this work. See Thoughts on Machiavelli, 223-25.
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pleased” (P 6). Newell thinks that this line by itself shows that Machiavelli invests
princely virtue with “godlike” creative power.19 However, in the very next line,
Machiavelli says that “without that opportunity their virtue of spirit would have been
eliminated” (P 6). The existence of princely virtue is altogether contingent upon the
presence of certain “opportunities.”
Yet when Machiavelli goes on to elaborate these opportunities, they do not sound
like opportunities in the usual sense at all. Each of the princes named by Machiavelli—
Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, Theseus, and Hiero—was exposed or cast out as a child; so too
was Castruccio.20 In addition, before founding their states, each prince was stateless and
oppressed, if not outright enslaved as in the case of Moses (P 26). Their earliest
experiences of the world, then, were marked by serious misfortune, illustrating the point
that Machiavelli himself had made in the first line of the “Castruccio.” After recounting
their various travails, Machiavelli concludes: “Such opportunities, therefore, made these
men happy, and their excellent virtue enabled the opportunity to be recognized; hence
their fatherlands were ennobled by it and became very happy” (P 6).
How exactly did the experience of bad luck contribute to the virtue and the
accomplishments of Machiavelli’s armed prophets? The sixth chapter of The Prince
raises this question without answering it. Even so, Machiavelli’s choice of examples
places the emphasis on the experience of serious misfortune early in life, almost
19 Newell, Tyranny, 301.
20 Machiavelli, “Life of Castruccio,” 533-35. Anachronistically, one might say that these
princes were born into the Hobbesian state of nature, radically alone at risk.
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beginning with the moment of birth. The experience of bad luck somehow contributes to
the character-formation of individuals who do not rely on luck.21 Bad luck may be good
luck insofar as bad luck constitutes an opportunity for the prince to learn something
important about himself. In light of the type of virtue realized by the armed prophets, it
seems that, for Machiavelli, misfortune brings home to the capable individual the
importance of self-reliance. In this way Machiavelli may offer his own take on the
proverbial Greek idea of pathei mathos, “learning through suffering.”22
Machiavelli’s thematic treatment of fortune in the twenty-fifth chapter of The
Prince clarifies his argument in the sixth. Note, first of all, that Machiavelli begins and
ends this chapter by attacking the idea that fortune is itself an independent force—that
contingency exercises agency. Whereas Augustine and Boethius trace changes in the
fortunes of human beings to the educative aspect of divine providence; whereas medieval
cosmologists trace such changes to the motions of the stars, Machiavelli casts fortune as a
river and a woman, against which men may contend.23 But in the chapter’s central
21 Thus Erica Benner’s recent interpretation—according to which virtù and fortuna are
mutually exclusive symbols of approbation and reprobation, respectively—seems too
simple. See her “Machiavelli’s Amoral Fortuna,” 481-99.
22 For example, see Aeschylus, Agamemnon 177, 250.
23 Note that many commentators suppose—mistakenly, in my view—that Machiavelli did
see fortune as an independent force, if not as a goddess. See Parel, Machiavellian
Cosmos, 17-18, 28-29, 77; Parel, “Farewell to Fortune,” 587-604; Nederman, “Amazing
Grace: Fortune, God, and Free Will,” 617-38; Viroli, Machiavelli, 21-24. But
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section, Machiavelli “descends to particulars,” again affirming that the character of the
virtuous prince is vulnerable to luck (P 25). In the sixth chapter, Machiavelli had
dramatized the paradoxical power of bad luck to plant the seed of virtue in the characters
of the greatest princes; in the twenty-fifth, Machiavelli shows that the human character is,
in general, rocky soil for the cultivation of virtue. His careful analysis of the inability of
most human beings to become virtuous may help us to see why even the “armed
prophets” needed to experience bad luck in order to realize their virtue.
Prudence is the keynote of Machiavelli’s analysis of luck and character in this
chapter. For Machiavelli, prudence refers to the capacity of the individual to adjust his
ways of acting and ruling to fit shifting circumstances.24 Luck inevitably obtrudes on
imprudent action because imprudent action proceeds without regard for contingency or
circumstance. But even prudent action is vulnerable to luck, inasmuch as it is a matter of
luck whether a man becomes prudent and therewith virtuous. Thus Eugene Garver writes:
“chapter 25 of The Prince precisely seems to make the ability to withstand incident luck
into a matter of constitutive luck.”25 Yet, Garver sees this turn in the argument as the self-
Machiavelli explodes the view of fortune as an external power; see my analysis of the
river image in Chapter 1 above.
24 Machiavellian prudence departs from its Aristotelian and Ciceronian ancestors, since it
is not yoked to ethical virtues such as justice or honestas. See Garver, Machiavelli and
the History of Prudence, 54; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 32; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s
Virtue, 13, 38-45, 309-10.
25 Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, 111.
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destruction of Machiavelli’s conception of princely agency, while I see it as the
culmination, in The Prince, of Machiavelli’s careful yet paradoxical reflections on the
topic of responsibility for character. Here Machiavelli burrows into the psyche of the
prince in order to explain his internal vulnerability to luck:
On this also depends the variability of the good: for if one governs himself
with caution and patience, and the times and affairs turn in such a way that
his government is good, he comes out happy; but if the times and affairs
change, he is ruined because he does not change his mode of proceeding.
Nor may a man be found so prudent as to know how to accommodate
himself to this, whether because he cannot deviate from what nature
inclines him to or also because, when one has always flourished by
walking on one path, he cannot be persuaded to depart from it. And so the
cautious man, when it is time to come to impetuosity, does not know how
to do it, hence comes to ruin; for if he would change his nature with the
times and with affairs, his fortune would not change. (P 25)
The most important obstacle to prudence is the tendency of the individual to
cleave out of habit to a certain mode of acting or ruling. “When one has flourished by
walking on one path, he cannot be persuaded to depart from it”; evidently, the prince
often believes that he himself is responsible for his success, that his success is not
contingent but natural and deserved (cf. P 2; D 3.8.2, 3.31.1). The belief that what
worked in the past will work well in the future corrupts prudence, and for this reason
likely issues in failure. Not only is bad luck actually good luck, but the obverse is also
true: good luck is bad luck because good luck seduces the prince into thinking that he is
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invulnerable. It is no accident that many princes who achieved success early in their
careers—for example, Cesare Borgia and Piero Soderini—are presented by Machiavelli
as failures in the end (P 7; D 3.3).
This explanation of the badness of good luck also illuminates, more brightly than
the sixth chapter, the goodness of bad luck. What does the prince learn through his
suffering? He learns that the human being is, as such, vulnerable to contingencies of
circumstance. Aware of his own vulnerability to contingencies of circumstance, and
hence of his need for prudence, the prince can resist both becoming “intoxicated” in good
fortune and “abject” in bad (D 3.31.1-3). Self-knowledge is the hoped-for-outcome of
bad luck.26 Otherwise, why was it necessary for Moses to find himself and his people
enslaved in Egypt, for Romulus to find himself stateless and bestialized? To be sure, bad
luck provided the armed prophets with a dark background against which their virtue
could shine. But the Machiavellian picture of politics suggests that such a background is
almost always available. Moreover, in the twentieth chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli
argues that a prince can “astutely nourish some enmity so that when he has crushed it, his
greatness emerges the more from it” (P 20). What a prince cannot nourish absent
26 Observe the key line in Castruccio’s deathbed speech: “It is in this world of great
importance to know oneself, and to be able to measure the forces of one’s spirit and of
one’s position.” Machiavelli, “Life of Castruccio,” 554. It may be no coincidence that
this speech mentions fortune more often (i.e., five times) than any other speech in
Machiavelli’s writings—so far as I know.
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adversity is the “spirit in great things” that enables him to act in accordance with
prudence even as the blows of fortune fall upon him (D 3.6.15).
To become, through bad luck, the kind of human being who is able to adjust to
changes in luck, precisely because he knows himself to be vulnerable to luck, is to owe a
great debt to luck indeed. But to say this much is still to understate the extent to which
the prince’s character is shaped by luck, because, as the above passage makes clear, the
prince must also have the right nature. Machiavelli concludes that passage as follows: “if
he would change his nature with the times and with affairs, his fortune would not change”
(P 25). What Machiavelli means to indicate, in my view, is that the prospect of perfect
flexibility is a tantalizing impossibility. Scattered throughout Machiavelli’s writings are
similar statements on the inability of men to change their natures. Consider Discourse
3.9: “Two things are causes why we are unable to change: one, that we are unable to
oppose that to which nature inclines us; the other, that when one individual has prospered
very much with one mode of proceeding, it is not possible to persuade him that he can do
well to proceed otherwise” (D 3.9.3). A discussion of these themes in the letter known as
the Ghiribizzi sounds the same note: “[men] cannot command their natures.”27
Emphatically and repeatedly, Machiavelli declares that the nature of the prince is
inflexible.28
Scholars who follow Leo Strauss—such as Newell, with whom I began this
section—would probably disagree with the foregoing reading. For these interpreters,
27 Trans. Gilbert. Machiavelli, “Letter No. 116,” 897.
28 On this point, and the Ghiribizzi, see also Nederman, “Amazing Grace,” 623-24.
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Machiavelli depicts the prince as a shape-shifter, who tames and channels his passions in
order to master fortune. Certainly Harvey Mansfield aims to follow Strauss when he
locates “the origin of what is called the ‘reductionism’ of modernity” in the persona of
Machiavelli’s protean prince.29 For Mansfield, the prince’s flexibility comprises the sum
and substance of his humanity: “while beasts are confined to their single natures, man is
the all-around beast who because of his rationality is free to take on the nature of any
convenient beast.”30
The problem with this emphasis on flexibility is that it does not square with
Machiavelli’s examples. While Machiavelli’s princes manifest flexible judgment, their
natures seem inflexible. Mansfield concedes the point: “Virtue, we have seen, must be
flexible. . . . But the main truth is that individuals have inflexible natures that define their
virtues and limit them to flourishing in times in which those virtues are appropriate.”31
What else could one conclude from the example of Pope Julius II in The Prince, chapter
25? Although Machiavelli marvels at Julius’s caginess, he also affirms that Julius was
impetuous by nature; and it was by chance that the times favored an impetuous, warlike
pope.32 “If times had come when he had needed to proceed with caution, his ruin would
have followed: he would never have deviated from those modes to which nature inclined
him” (P 25). In fact, inflexibility marks almost every ancient prince or “prince of the
29 Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 37.
30 Ibid., 38.
31 Ibid., 41-42.
32 Ronald Beiner notes Julius’s guile in Civil Religion, 24-26. Cf. D 3.44.
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republic” whom Machiavelli praises.33 Hannibal was cruel; Titus Manlius Torquatus,
severe; Fabius Maximus, prudent and cautious; Scipio Africanus, agreeable; Valerius
Corvinus, gentle; Romulus, warlike; and Numa, pacific.34
True, Machiavelli exhorts the prince to manage his reputation theatrically. In
Newell’s view, for example, Machiavelli “tells the prince that there is nothing more
useful for him than to cultivate the appearance of possessing the traditional virtues as a
reputational smokescreen.”35 Indeed, beginning with Guicciardini, readers of Machiavelli
have often noted the importance of “theatricality” to Machiavellian virtue.36 It is
important, though, that we do not conflate the reputation for virtue with virtue itself—the
very mistake that Machiavelli associates with the classical and Christian discourses on
the virtues. The point of Machiavelli’s trans-valuation of the virtues in Chapters 15
through 19 of The Prince is to substitute virtues that are effective “in deed” for
33 The phrase, “prince of the republic,” occurs in Discourse 1.33.3.
34 Machiavelli treats the inflexible nature of Hannibal in The Prince ch. 18 and Discourse
3.21; that of Torquatus, in Discourse 3.22; Fabius, in Discourse 3.9; Scipio, in The
Prince ch. 14 and 17 and Discourse 3.21; Valerius, in Discourse 3.22; Romulus, in The
Prince ch. 6 and Discourse 1.19; and Numa, likewise in Discourse 1.19. In these lines I
echo the formulation of Strauss while challenging his conclusion. See Thoughts on
Machiavelli, 244 ff.
35 Newell, Tyranny, 329.
36 For example, Guicciardini, “Considerations,” 412; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 15,
33-35; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 16-19, 25.
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philosophic and otherworldly virtues, which aid the prince only “in speech” (P 15).37 For
example, Machiavelli says, in Chapter 17, that “Cesare Borgia was held to be cruel;
nonetheless, his cruelty restored the Romagna, united it, and reduced it to peace and
faith” (P 17). Therefore a prince “should not care about the infamy of cruelty,” because
37 See also Discourse 2.15, in which Machiavelli quotes, from Livy, the words of the
Latin praetor Annius: “‘I judge it to belong to the highest of our affairs for you to
consider more what we ought to do than what is to be said. Once the counsels are made
clear, it will be easy to accommodate words to things.’ Without doubt these words are
very true and should be relished by every prince and by every republic” (D 2.15.1; cf.
Livy 8.4). Later in the Discourses, Machiavelli recommends a similar speech by the
Roman consul Valerius Corvinus: “‘Soldiers, I want you to follow my deeds, not my
words; to seek from me not only discipline but also example, who have won for myself
with this right hand three consulates and the highest praise.’ These words, considered
well, teach anyone whatever how he ought to proceed if he wishes to hold the rank of
captain; and one who has done otherwise will find in time that whether he was led to the
rank by fortune or by ambition, it will be taken from him and will not give him
reputation, for titles do not give luster to men, but men to titles” (D 3.31.1; cf. Livy 7.32).
In sum, deeds are more efficacious than words—though a stirring speech about the
efficaciousness of deeds is also efficacious, apparently. It would be useful and interesting
to compare the dynamic opposition between words and deeds in Machiavelli’s thought to
the similar opposition found in Thucydides’ thought. See Chapter 4 on the logos-ergon
opposition in Thucydides.
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cruelty, as practiced by Cesare and Hannibal, works as a mode of rule (P 17). In the
eighteenth chapter, Machiavelli again redirects the gaze of the prince away from speeches
and toward deeds. His striking suggestion is that the tendency of the people to be “taken
in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing” actually relieves the prince of the need
to pander to the people: “So let a prince win and maintain his state: the means will always
be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone” (P 18; see also P 3; D 3.3). At the
same time, and for the same reason, it is easy for the prince to win over the people by
giving outward signs of generosity and religiosity. Because “everyone sees how you
appear, [yet] few touch what you are,” the prince can focus his attention on the effective
application of power, while appeasing the people from time to time (P 18). Thus
Machiavelli concludes this line of argument: a prince who knows “how to avoid those
things that make him hateful and contemptible . . . will have done his part and will find
no danger in his other infamies” (P 19; see also D 1.27.2).
Not only does Machiavelli assert, then, that nature dispenses inflexible characters
to princes by chance, but he also warns against the pursuit of perfect flexibility as a mode
of rule: “Above all, a prince should live with his subjects so that no single accident
whether good or bad has to make him change” (P 8). Because the prince cannot change
his nature, he should not attempt to walk a “middle way” between qualities, but should
instead “always [proceed] as nature forces [him]” (D 3.9.1, 3.21.3).38 To do otherwise is
38 Against this argument, someone cite The Prince, ch. 18: “And so [the prince] needs to
have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and variation of things command
him. . . .” Without a doubt, there is a tension in Machiavelli’s thought on this point—
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to repeat the mistake of the Roman Decemvir Appius Claudius, who deceived himself
when he tried to ascend from humble friendship with the Roman people to proud rule
over them (D 1.40-41, 2.14). Flexible judgment, not flexibility of character, is the key to
success for Machiavelli. Thus we can make sense of his parody of the Ciceronian parable
in The Prince, Chapter 18: “the one who has known best how to use the fox has come out
best” because foxy cunning, steeled by experience in wielding leonine force, is usually
successful (P 18).39 As we have seen, prudence requires, for its development, the
coincidence of a talented nature—a “first brain” (P 22)—with bad luck sufficient to spur
the would-be prince to develop his virtue. The prince of virtue is, therefore, vulnerable to
luck—both inside and out.
though I think that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Machiavelli advises
the prince to exercise flexible judgment, not to try to change his nature altogether. When
Machiavelli says in this line that the prince should have a spirit (animo) disposed to
change like the wind, he may mean that the prince should be sufficiently bold and
irreverent to take advantage of every contingency of circumstance. On animo, see Clarke,
“On the Woman Question in Machiavelli,” 237-41; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 40.
See also Mansfield’s note on animo in The Prince, 4 n. 5: “animo refers to the ‘spirit’
with which human beings defend themselves. . . .”
39 I do not intend to follow Lukes in “Lionizing Machiavelli,” 561-75. Prudence is
powerless absent boldness, while boldness needs prudence in order to rise above
recklessness.
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That the prince is not responsible for his own character gives rise to a political
problem that lies at the heart of Machiavelli’s thought. What will happen to the prince’s
state when he dies? Machiavelli doubts that the virtuous prince can communicate his
virtue to his son. Septimius Severus, a man whom Machiavelli calls “a new prince” and
“a very fierce lion and a very astute fox,” fathered Caracalla, who succeeded him as
emperor (P 19). Although Caracalla’s nature resembled that of his father, Machiavelli
suggests that Caracalla did not experience the type of bad luck that might have taught
him his father’s foxiness. Conversely, the gentle and philosophic Marcus Aurelius
generated a son, Commodus, whose brutal and obtuse nature overwhelmed his education
(P 19; see also D 3.6.10). Machiavelli’s treatment of the problem of succession in the
nineteenth chapter suggests that the prince should adopt his son; elsewhere Machiavelli
makes explicit his preference for adoption (D 1.10). Be that as it may, The Prince
exhibits the general failure of princes—even “adopted princes,” such as Marcus
Aurelius—to select worthy heirs. Just as the prince cannot fully control his own
character, so too he fails to control the character of his successor. It is for this reason that
Machiavelli is, ultimately, a critic of the principality as a regime-type. He prefers to the
principality the regime that aims to generate “infinite most virtuous princes,” namely, the
republic (D 1.20).
The Problem of Fortune Solved? Machiavelli’s Discourses
In Discourse 3.9, Machiavelli offers a programmatic statement on the superiority of the
republic to the principality. This discourse is linked to The Prince, Chapter 25, by its title,
argument, and examples. As in The Prince, Machiavelli argues that a man would enjoy
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continuous good fortune if he could change his nature to fit every circumstance; the fact
of the matter, however, is that he cannot so change himself. So too Julius II appears,
again, as an example of inflexibility. However, Discourse 3.9 goes on to address the key
political question that is left unaddressed in The Prince—the question of succession. In
particular, Machiavelli recounts the succession in Roman leadership from Fabius
Maximus Cunctator to Scipio Africanus:
But [Scipio] was born in a republic where there were diverse citizens and
diverse humors; as it had Fabius, who was the best in times proper for
sustaining war, so later it had Scipio in times apt for winning it.
Hence it arises that a republic has greater life and good fortune
longer than a principality, for it can accommodate itself better than one
prince can to the diversity of times through the diversity of the citizens
that are in it. For a man who is accustomed to proceed in one mode never
changes, as was said; and it must be of necessity that when the times
change not in conformity with his mode, he is ruined. (D 3.9.1-2)
Machiavelli suggests that republican adaptability arises, in the first place, from the
diversity of human types contained within the republic’s pool of citizens. Moreover, the
republic somehow manages to call upon the right leader at the right time. In a time that
called for caution, Fabius Maximus Cunctator (hesitator) led the Roman army against
Hannibal; but the young and fiery Scipio Africanus assumed the command when the
opportunity arose to defeat Hannibal once and for all. The question is how the republic
transitions from one leader, or set of leaders, to another in accordance with changes in
circumstance. One may also wonder how the republic generates so many potential
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leaders. While Machiavelli insists, in Discourse 3.9, on the adaptability of the republic in
responding to accidents, he does not explain how this works.
Civic-humanist and democratic interpreters of Machiavelli seize on Discourse 3.9
because these interpreters think that they can readily explain the phenomenon of
republican succession and hence of republican adaptability. In short, the republic as a
whole prudently chooses its leaders, employing democratic mechanisms of deliberation
and election. Citing Discourse 3.9, J.G.A. Pocock writes: “the few and the many together
know how to choose . . . the right man at the right moment.”40 John McCormick also
emphasizes “the will of [the] political body” of Roman citizens in “responding to
accidents.”41 For McCormick, the socioeconomic and institutional mixing of the few and
the many rendered the Roman republic “more conducive and specifically adaptive to
political reality.”42 Similarly, Garver goes so far as to call Machiavelli’s Rome “a
community of Machiavellian princes,” in which “prudence and virtù are employed by an
entire community.”43
It does not make sense, however, to consider the Machiavellian republic “a
community of princes” unless the people in fact elects its “princes” and holds them
accountable. Ryan Balot and Stephen Trochimchuk have recently argued against the
40 Pocock, “Machiavelli and Rome,” 152-53.
41 McCormick, “Addressing the Political Exception,” 889.
42 Ibid., 895.
43 Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, 123.
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democratic view of Machiavelli’s Rome.44 They show that the people, on Machiavelli’s
presentation, does not participate in deliberation and self-government; rather, the demos
is ruled, either directly or indirectly (for example, through religion), by the nobility. For
my purposes in this section of the chapter, in which I aim to clarify the puzzle of the
republic’s “greater life and good fortune,” asserted by Machiavelli in Discourse 3.9, it
suffices to say that the civic-humanist and democratic interpreters of Machiavelli seem to
miss the mark, because the actions of Machiavelli’s plebs are neither self-guided nor
prudent. Whereas the prince is inflexible, the people is all too flexible.
The flexibility of the people is a point that scholars have not recognized, though it
is one that Machiavelli himself accentuates across his works. Machiavelli’s Roman
citizenry does not manifest “political, moral, and economic autonomy,” in the words of
Pocock.45 On the contrary, what defines the many, in contradistinction to the few, is
flexibility, that is, the susceptibility of the many either to be educated or corrupted at the
hands of the few. In Machiavelli’s own words: “The nature of peoples is variable; and it
is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion” (P
6). Machiavelli ascribes to the prince tremendous power to reshape the character of the
people: “It is more true than any other truth that if where there are men there are no
soldiers, it arises through a defect of the prince and not through any other defect, either of
44 Balot and Trochimchuk, “The Many and the Few,” 559-588.
45 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 212.
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the site or of nature (D 1.21.1).46 Furthermore, Machiavelli does not wholly exempt
republican peoples from his characterization of the demos as flexible, though he does
recognize that republican peoples display fierce patriotism (P 5; D 1.58, 3.8.1). Even the
Roman people reacted, hysterically, to changes in circumstance—by turns hoping for the
unattainable best and fearing the unlikely worst (D 1.44, 1.53, 2.29). Machiavelli joins a
long line of political thinkers, stretching back to classical antiquity, who worry that the
fickle emotions of the demos cloud its judgment.47 At the same time, Machiavelli sees in
the irrepressible fears and hopes of the people the possibility of successful demos-
management. Extraordinary leaders can use emotional alchemy, as it were, to order the
people, especially during war (D 3.14, 3.33).
That the flexible Roman people are themselves shaped and directed by inflexible
princes of the republic raises, with greater urgency, the question of how the republic
manages to solve the problem of succession by matching leaders of diverse natures to the
diverse accidents faced by the republic over time. What accounts for the “greater life and
good fortune” of the republic? To be sure, “there was always a place for the virtue of
men” in Machiavelli’s Rome because the republic was “ordered for war” (D 3.16.2).
Moreover, the Romans “went to find virtue in whatever house it inhabited,” refusing to
46 The prince’s ability to shape the people is relevant in the republican context.
Machiavelli frequently refers to “princes of the republic” (e.g., Discourses, 1.12.1,
1.18.4, 1.20, 1.29.3, 1.33.3).
47 See, for example, Thucydides’ remarks at 2.65.4-9 and 4.108.4, among many other
passages treated in Chapter 4.
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discount leaders on the basis of age, wealth, or social status (D 1.60, 3.25.1). These
design features do not explain, however, why it was that Rome had a large number of
capable citizens in its pool of potential consuls, tribunes, dictators, and captains. Nor do
they explain the fundamental problem: how did one leader come to succeed another?
Could it be the case, then, that particular Roman leaders arose at particular times
as a matter of luck? Indeed, when we look more closely at the signal example put forth by
Machiavelli in Discourse 3.9, the transition in leadership from Fabius Maximus
Cunctator to Scipio Africanus, we see that a confluence both of contingent relations
between the classes and of contingent events on the battlefield precipitated Scipio’s
ascendancy and success. How did Scipio win the consulship and defeat Hannibal?
Machiavelli nowhere says that the plebs “elected” Scipio. He might seem to say, at the
conclusion of the seventeenth chapter of The Prince, that the Senate was responsible for
Scipio’s ascendancy to the consulship. However, Discourse 1.53 shows that the Senate
trusted “the judgment of Fabius Maximus” over and against that of Scipio (D 1.53.4).
Only when Scipio threatened to propose the enterprise to the people, knowing “that great
hopes and mighty promises easily move [the people],” did the Senate acquiesce in his
plan to venture to Africa.48 Evidently the Senate held out little hope that Scipio would
48 These words are drawn from the title of Discourse 1.53. Machiavelli suggests that the
Senate may have agreed to send Scipio against Hannibal for the same reason it previously
agreed to send Marcus Centenius Penula, “a very vile man”: “To the Senate [Penula’s]
request appeared rash; nonetheless, thinking that if it were denied to him and his asking
later became known among the people, there might arise from it some tumult, envy, and
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defeat Hannibal; but defeat him he did. Here the narrative becomes still more complex.
For Scipio’s success was also brought about by Hannibal’s imprudent hopefulness.
Hannibal pressed on after defeating the Romans at Cannae, whereas, in Machiavelli’s
judgment, “the intention of the Carthaginians should have been to show the Romans that
they were able enough to combat them, and, having had victory over them, one should
not seek to lose it through hope of a greater” (D 2.27.1). Thus the career of Scipio
Africanus, as Machiavelli depicts it, involves a complex interplay of human agency with
accidents domestic and foreign.
Throughout the Discourses, in fact, Machiavelli shows that “accidents” obtrude
on the political agency of the republic, and he explicitly associates accidenti with
fortuna.49 On the topic of Rome’s internal vulnerability to luck, consider that Machiavelli
disfavor toward the senatorial order, they conceded it to him, wishing rather to put in
danger all those who followed him. . .” ( D 1.53.3). Penula and his detachment never
returned. The implication is that the Senate was likewise willing to try its luck with
Scipio, believing that his defeat would at least rid the city of a menace. On senatorial
manipulation of Scipio, see the recent account of McCormick, “Machiavelli’s Inglorious
Tyrants,” 29-52.
49 For example, the near-conquest of Rome by the Gauls was both the work of “fortune”
and an “extrinsic accident” (D 2.29-30, 3.1). See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 223:
“We conclude that the fundamental thought which finds expression in both books
consists in a movement from God to Fortuna and then from Fortuna via accidents, and
accidents occurring to bodies or accidents of bodies, to chance understood as a non-
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declines to praise Rome for the gratitude shown by its citizens to exceptional individuals,
just as he declines to blame ancient-democratic Athens for its ingratitude. Machiavelli
instead emphasizes “the diversity of accidents that arose in these cities. For whoever
considers things subtly will see for himself that if freedom had been taken away in Rome
as in Athens, Rome would not have been more merciful toward its citizens than the latter
was” (D 1.28). Individual leaders of the republic inevitably alter its constitution and
history; the accidental rise of the Peisistratid tyranny accounted for the ingratitude of the
Athenians. Thus Machiavelli suggests that the Roman republic might have succumbed to
tyranny at the time of the Decemvirate if Appius Claudius had been shrewd (D 1.40.5).
Alternatively, if a man “expert in civil affairs,” such as the Florentine Niccolò da Uzzano,
had been alive during the time of Caesar, the republic might have been preserved (D
1.33.3). Of course, Machiavelli argues, in the opening discourses of the work, that the
teleological necessity which leaves room for choice and prudence and therefore for
chance as the cause of simply unforeseeable accidents.” Precisely because Machiavelli
does not see fortune as something “out there” in the world, he can use this idea in
multiple registers, including in reference to the unexpected outcomes of human action
itself. On the distinctiveness of Machiavelli’s language of accidents and its specific
differences from scholastic usages of the term, see McCormick, “Addressing the Political
Exception,” 888-89. On the possibility that Machiavelli was influenced by the Lucretian
usage of “accidents,” see Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things,” 455-58; and Rahe, “In
the Shadow of Lucretius,” 30-55.
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very institutional structure of the Roman republic arose out of a series of accidents that he
explicitly ascribes to chance: “what an orderer had not done, chance did” (D 1.2.7 ff.).50
Rome’s external vulnerability to accidents is no less fundamental to Machiavelli’s
analysis. As we have already noted, contingent events on the battlefield, such as Scipio’s
conquest of the Carthaginians at Zama, affected the composition of the Roman leadership
and relations between the classes. Machiavelli returns again and again to the near-defeat
of the Romans at the hands of the Gauls; this “extrinsic accident” could have resulted in
the end of Roman freedom (D 2.29-30, 3.1, 3.30). In the event, however, the invasion of
the Gauls was among those “strong and difficult accident[s], in which each, seeing
himself perishing, puts aside every ambition and runs voluntarily to obey him who he
believes can free him with his virtue” (D 3.30.1). Having escaped the Gauls, due to the
leadership of the general Marcus Furius Camillus above all, the Romans supported
Camillus in his project of re-founding the republic’s religious and judicial orders (D
3.1.2). Extrinsic accidents, mediated by the actions of leaders like Camillus, led to
alterations in Rome’s core institutions and practices. To give another example, a certain
50 In these passages Machiavelli uses the words “fortune,” “chance,” and “accidents”
interchangeably; in addition to the line quoted above, consider the following line, drawn
from the same passage: “For if the first fortune did not fall to Rome, the second fell to it;
for if its first orders were defective, nonetheless they did not deviate from the right way
that could lead them to perfection” (D 1.2.7). Cf. the title of the following Discourse:
“What Accidents made the Tribunes of the Plebs Be Created in Rome, Which Made the
Republic More Perfect” (D 1.3).
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“conspiracy” of the Latins and the Sabines, who sought to check Rome’s burgeoning
power, occasioned the advent of the dictatorship, a “remedy” that Machiavelli judges
“always most useful in all those accidents that arose at any time against the republic in
the increasing of the empire” (D 1.33.1).
Thus Machiavelli’s paradoxical identification of bad luck with good luck recurs
on the level of the republic. Not only did the mixed structure of the Roman government
arise out of contestations between the few and the many after the death of the Tarquin
kings, but Rome also achieved its military strength and glory-loving ethos not least
because “in every least part of the world the Romans found a conspiracy of republics
very armed and very obstinate in defense of their freedom”—that is, because neighboring
peoples attacked them from all sides, compelling the Romans to grow stronger (D 2.2.2).
The modes and orders of the Roman republic took shape under pressures exerted by
apparent misfortunes. It was by accident, so to speak, that the republic discovered modi
ed ordini capable of responding to accidents.
But this means that while “it is of necessity, as was said other times, that in a
great city accidents arise every day that have need of a physician,” the republic does not
always succeed in diagnosing the disease or in prescribing the appropriate remedy (D
3.49.1).51 Thus, in this final discourse of the work, Machiavelli offers the example of
Quintus Fabius Maximus, who restored the exclusivity of the Senate by reversing the
reforms of Appius Claudius Crassus—reforms that had allowed plebian Romans to be
51 Discourses, 3.49.1.
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elected senators.52 Rome had need of such a correction to its most fundamental
institutions “every day” in Machiavelli’s view (D 3.49.1). In this way Machiavelli
suggests that Rome’s basic orders were themselves radically contingent. I conclude, then,
that Pocock goes too far when he suggests that “escape from time and change” was the
goal of Rome; and that “this goal was achieved” by the republic.53 Machiavelli’s Rome
does not “escape from fortuna”; even at the height of its power, the republic was shaped
by its daily confrontation with fortuna.54
The Constancy of Machiavelli’s Marcus Furius Camillus
This chapter cuts against the grain of the critical literature inasmuch as I attempt to
clarify Machiavelli’s pessimistic reflections on political agency. But I do not conclude,
with Viroli, that Machiavelli’s “belief in Fortune . . . calls for resignation.”55 As we have
52 See Livy 9.46.
53 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 190. Cf. McCormick, “Addressing the Political
Exception,” 895.
54 Again, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 190.
55 To be fair to Viroli, I reproduce the full line: “[Machiavelli’s] belief in Fortune and
heaven call for resignation; his commitment to the pursuit of great things calls for
political action.” See his Machiavelli, 21. Yet, on Viroli’s reading, the pursuit of great
things is possible only to the extent that fortune permits it. Viroli argues that Machiavelli
deferred to fortuna when he resigned himself to life on the fringes of politics (173). For a
fundamentally similar view, see Martinez, “Tragic Machiavelli,” 102-9.
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seen, Machiavelli shows that the extraordinary political actor sometimes learns in
adversity the importance of prudence and steadfastness; these qualities of character
empower him to contend with fortune. What is more, Machiavelli suggests, in the third
book of the Discourses, that a republican re-founder should attempt to imprint his
virtuous character on the citizens of the republic.
More precisely, Machiavelli’s treatment of Marcus Furius Camillus, the great re-
founder of Rome, demonstrates how an extraordinary individual may convert his virtue
into “a mode of life” or an “education” that leads even the overly flexible people to
approach his firmness of spirit (D 3.31). The “greater life and good fortune” of the
republic had its origin in the Roman education, which Machiavelli traces to the mind of
Camillus—though he makes clear, at the same time, that Camillus was one among a
series of Roman re-founders (D 3.1, 3.49). Furthermore, Machiavelli’s depiction of the
career of Camillus suggests that the nature of the Roman nobility, no less than that of the
plebs, was susceptible to being shaped by a prince of the republic (D 3.31.3, 3.36, 3.46).56
How, then, does Camillus’ re-founding of Rome bear on the puzzle of Discourse
3.9? I have not yet explained how the republic 1) generated a deep pool of potential
leaders, while managing 2) to call upon the leader whose nature suited the time.
56 Perhaps the Roman education took hold of the nobility most of all. Machiavelli’s
Roman Senate often acted in accordance with the ethos of hardhearted detachment
inculcated by Camillus and the other re-founders (cf. D 1.11, 1.13, 1.33, 1.38, 1.48, 1.51,
1.54, 1.55, 1.57, 2.23, 2.33, 3.11, 3.22, 3.25, 3.28). But this topic lies beyond the scope of
the chapter.
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Machiavelli’s depiction of the republican re-founding wrought by Camillus goes some
way toward solving the first half of the puzzle. Camillus shaped the Roman character,
including the character of the nobility; in so doing, he might have hoped to generate
multiple potential successors. The second problem, however, will prove intractable.
Close attention to Machiavelli’s account of Marcus Furius Camillus is all but
absent from the critical literature.57 This is a peculiar lacuna, in light of the attention that
Machiavelli himself lavishes upon Camillus. Of all the “prudent princes” who ordered
Rome for a “free way of life” (D 3.1.1), Machiavelli devotes, in the Discourses, the most
ink and praise to Camillus, who was “the most prudent of all the Roman captains” (D
3.12.3) and a man “adored as a prince” (1.29.3). Not even Romulus receives similar
treatment. One possible reason for the discrepancy is that Machiavelli wants to explode
the distinction between the founder and re-founder: “And truly, if a prince seeks the glory
of the world, he ought to desire to possess a corrupt city—not to spoil it entirely as did
57 Those who mention Camillus do so in the context of treating what Strauss calls “the
Tacitean subsection,” i.e., Discourses 3.19-23. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 160-5;
Coby, Liberty and Greatness, 179-88; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders,
373-86; Sullivan, Machiavelli’s Three Romes, 148-54; Zuckert, “Machiavelli’s
Democratic Republic,” 288, 290. No entry for Camillus is found in the indices of many
books on Machiavelli’s republicanism—e.g., Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire;
and Bock, Skinner, and Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism.
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Caesar but to reorder it as did Romulus” (D 1.10.6). Since every founder is a re-founder,
Machiavelli attends to the paradigmatic re-founder, Camillus.58
More importantly, Machiavelli uses the re-founding of Rome by Camillus to
deepen his reflections on the relation of political agency to contingency. Fortune looms
large in the career of Camillus. Camillus is a prince who learned through bad luck—in his
case, exile—to cultivate indifference to luck, the better to adjust to luck. Prior to his
exile, Camillus was “altogether rash and hardly prudent” (D 3.23). Machiavelli tells us
that Camillus vacillated, wildly, in his rule as general. For example, Camillus confiscated
the booty gathered by his soldiers after the conquest of Veii on the grounds that he had
promised it to Apollo; yet, upon returning to Rome, he paraded through the city in the
guise of Jupiter, an act that betrayed Camillus’ impiety (D 1.55.1, 3.23).59 It was only in
58 Anticipating Nietzsche and Foucault, Machiavelli argues that there exists no primordial
moment of foundation. See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 142. Consider
also Machiavelli’s characterization of Romulus as the paradigmatic founder in
comparison to the Augustinian and Ciceronian depictions of Romulus. Characteristically,
Machiavelli endorses the Augustinian depiction, while severing that view from its
Augustinian corollary, i.e., Christ as the founder of the City of God. Cf. Augustine, City
of God 22.6, in which Augustine also reproduces Cicero’s depiction of Romulus in the
Republic. Finally, on these points, cf. Breiner, “Machiavelli’s ‘New Prince’ and the
Primordial Moment of Acquisition,” 66-92.
59 In this respect Machiavelli’s Camillus differs from Livy’s more pious Camillus. See
Livy 5.23.
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exile that Camillus evidently learned to be at once prudent and steadfast—in a word,
virtuous. Post-exile Camillus emerges as the embodiment of self-reliance for Machiavelli.
With Camillus as his exemplar, Machiavelli argues that “excellent men retain their same
dignity in every fortune,” because for “great men [who] are always the same . . . fortune
does not have power over them” (D 3.31.1). It was by chance, though, that Camillus was
recalled to Rome at all. According to Machiavelli, the “extrinsic accident” of the Gallic
invasion led the Romans to send for Camillus, “who alone could have been the sole
remedy for such an evil” (D 2.30.1). Moreover, Camillus arrived in the nick of time;
already the Romans were submitting to the terms of surrender set by the Gauls (D
2.30.1). In more than one way, then, Machiavelli presents Camillus’ re-founding of Rome
as accidental.
At the same time, Machiavelli argues that the republic did gain a significant
degree of control over fortune through Camillus’ renovation of Rome’s modes and
orders. Consider Discourse 3.31, which constitutes both Machiavelli’s last word on
Camillus and his final thematic statement on fortuna in the Discourses. The title of this
discourse is “Strong Republics and Excellent Men Retain the Same Spirit and Their Same
Dignity in Every Fortune.” Mansfield argues that “it is with regard to Machiavelli himself
that one must understand this passage”; for the passage seems to introduce a Stoic lesson
on equanimity, whereas the discourse as a whole recommends “a substituted hardness of
calculation in place of the noble and enduring qualities of soul.”60 I suggest that
60 Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 51-52; see also Mansfield, New Modes and Orders,
401-404.
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Machiavelli does not simply take a dim view of Stoicism. In Discourse 3.31, Machiavelli
puts Stoic equanimity to his own purposes, politicizing and democratizing it.
The argument of Discourse 3.31 proceeds as follows. First, Machiavelli points to
the example of Camillus in order to show that “great men are always the same in every
fortune; and if it varies—now by exalting them, now by crushing them—they do not vary
but always keep their spirit firm” (D 3.31.1). His next move is to say that “the virtue and
vice that I say are to be found in one man alone are also found in a republic” (D 3.31.2).
A captain can imprint his character on the citizens of the republic by re-founding the
republic’s modes and orders, especially its martial modes and orders. Machiavelli’s
Camillus re-ordered the republic “in every part, so as to be able to have men who have
spirit, and indeed the orders and modes of his proceeding”; otherwise, in fact, Camillus
would have “come to ruin” (D 3.31.4). By changing the tenor of its existence, its “mode
of life,” republican re-founding empowers a whole people to become and remain
ferocious in the face of serious misfortune:
For becoming insolent in good fortune and abject in bad arises from your
mode of proceeding and from the education in which you are raised. When
that is weak and vain, it renders you like itself; when it has been
otherwise, it renders you also of another fate; and by making you a better
knower of the world, it makes you rejoice less in the good and be less
aggrieved with the bad. What is said of one alone is said of many who live
one and the same republic: they are made to that perfection that its mode
of life has.
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Although it was said another time that the foundation of all states
is a good military, and that where this does not exist there can be neither
good laws nor any other good thing, it does not appear to me superfluous
to repeat it. (D 3.31.3-4)
This passage confirms that Machiavelli places equanimity at the core of princely
and republican virtue. Strength requires self-possession, the peculiar combination of
prudence and boldness that enables the extraordinary individual—and, under his tutelage,
the whole state—to face up to ostensible bad luck. However, Mansfield is right to argue
that Machiavelli parts company with Livy and Cicero in the decisive respect. Whereas for
the Stoics equanimity describes genuine indifference to the goods of fortune, Machiavelli
thinks that equanimity is good for the character of the prince and the republic because
action grounded in equanimity most often succeeds in winning the goods of fortune. Thus
we can explain why Machiavelli repeats, at the conclusion of the above passage, his old
saw on the fundamental importance of arms (P 12; D 1.4.1). What explains Rome’s
“greater life and good fortune” is, in particular, the quasi-Stoical martial education
authored by a series of princes of the city, especially Camillus. Machiavelli admires the
Roman education because such an education is a wellspring of efficacious power and
martial glory.
The Inconstancy of Machiavelli
Does Machiavelli’s unique treatment of Camillus answer the questions that we have
raised about the vulnerability of the prince and the republic to luck? On the one hand,
Machiavelli’s Camillus appears to be the rare prince who exercises control over his own
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character—albeit after learning, through bad luck, what virtue requires. In particular,
Camillus learned that indifference to good or bad luck allows one to remain coolheaded;
what’s more, Camillus made his understanding effectual by teaching the Romans to
imitate his boldness, if not his prudence. Having been remade in the image of Camillus,
Rome was, arguably, more stable and powerful. In the short term, Rome may have
contended, more successfully, with extrinsic accidents, especially the attack of the
Tuscans (D 3.30). Perhaps Camillus’ education of the Romans also produced, in the long-
term, multiple future leaders who shared his character, such as Titus Manlius Torquatus
(D 3.23-24). Thus the re-founding of Rome by Camillus may seem to represent a solution
to the problem of succession.
Yet this solution is merely partial. If the character of the whole republic is set by a
re-founder such as Camillus, Machiavelli begs the question: whence the re-founder?
Machiavelli offers no concrete advice for overcoming this regress, which is not to say
that he does not recognize the problem. The last of the Discourses states, in
uncompromising terms, the necessity of continuous innovation in the institutions and
practices of the republic. “Every day” Rome found itself in need of a “wise physician,”
that is, a Camillean re-founder, who could respond, prudently, to the intrinsic and
extrinsic accidents afflicting the republic (D 3.49; see also D 3.1). Of course, Rome did
not always succeed in discovering a re-founder rather than a corrupter, a Camillus rather
than a Caesar. Just as the vulnerability of the extraordinary individual to fortune leads the
reader from The Prince to the Discourses, so too does the vulnerability of the republic to
fortune lead him back to the topic of founding and hence to The Prince. It is appropriate,
in fact, that both The Prince and the Discourses conclude with unblinking
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acknowledgment of the vulnerability of the prince and the republic to fortune. If
Machiavelli had exaggerated the effectiveness of virtue in controlling fortune, then he
would have ceased to explain virtue and to teach it.
More questionable, however, is the quasi-Stoical ethos that Machiavelli ascribes
to Camillus. According to Seneca, for example, virtue “demands no external equipment.
It is home-grown, proceeding wholly from itself: it begins to be subject to fortune if it
attempts to derive any part of itself from without.”61 Original to Machiavelli is the idea
that equanimity constitutes virtue because equanimity succeeds in acquiring for the
individual and the republic the equipment that Seneca regards as superfluous, if not
downright damaging, to virtue. This is a paradox: for Machiavelli, it is advantageous to
cultivate internal superiority to fortune precisely because a person who possesses such a
character is most likely to succeed in winning the goods of fortune. How Seneca would
respond is patent: it makes no sense to look down on alterations in fortune unless one is
actually indifferent to the goods and evils those changes might bring. Doubtful, too, is the
psychological soundness of the Machiavellian ethos. How is it possible for an ambitious
individual—who wants, badly, to succeed, to win the goods of fortune—to cultivate
indifference to his own abjectness, as Machiavelli’s Camillus claims to have done?
Again, Machiavelli recognizes this problem. As we have seen, he argues that
experience, especially adverse experience, has the potential to teach the naturally talented
political actor that he can think straight when he distances himself from his successes and
61 I have slightly modified Barker’s translation, replacing “paraphernalia” with
“equipment.” See Seneca, “Letter IX,” 24.
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failures. Bad luck constitutes an opportunity for the princely individual to learn the limits
of his own power, which, paradoxically, may help him to acquire greater power. With the
help of luck, princes and princes of republics can become at least partially responsible for
their virtue.
Some modern political philosophers after Machiavelli seek to cut the Gordian
knot by conquering fortune once and for all, thereby relieving human beings of the
responsibility of virtue. The difference between Machiavelli and Hobbes, for example, is
that Hobbes attempts to create a new political form, the modern state, that will deliver
material well-being to the people irrespective of the character of the individuals who
exercise political authority. Hobbes indicates his departure from Machiavelli in the letter
dedicatory that precedes Leviathan. Whereas Machiavelli seizes on the invasion of Rome
by the Gauls as a signal instance of the paradoxical equation of bad luck with good luck,
since the invasion led to the rise of Marcus Furius Camillus and the re-founding of Rome,
Hobbes uses this episode to suggest that the state can be made invulnerable to luck.
Human beings can be relied upon to squawk like the Capitoline geese; what cannot be
relied upon is the virtue of a Camillus (or a Manlius Capitolinus or a Sidney
Godolphin).62 The political form that relies on ordinary passions rather than exceptional
persons does not leave itself exposed to the influence—worse, the absence—of the latter.
62 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1-2. In Chapter 29 of Leviathan, Hobbes argues that his
commonwealth is “designed to live as long as mankind” (210). That the perdurance of the
state should not depend on the character its leaders is a central plank of Hobbes’s critique
of republican liberty in Chapter 21. Of course, many modern political theorists follow
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Yet Machiavelli’s own reliance on exceptional persons invites a democratic
challenge. While Machiavelli argues that a prince could teach the people to hold firm in
the face of serious misfortune, he ultimately suggests that the people’s ability to do so
hinges wholly on the prince himself. This “top-down” view raises various questions: is it
possible that ordinary people exercise their own distinctive virtues and vices in the face
of apparent good or bad luck? Even more pointedly, is there a democratic politics of luck
that rivals Machiavelli’s princely-republican model in eschewing intoxication in good
luck and abjectness in bad? To address these questions, I return to Athens, where
Thucydides offered rich depictions and analyses of the place of luck in Athenian-
democratic politics.
Machiavelli by emphasizing the importance of virtue among both leaders and the people.
For example, Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 115: “in the constitution of all
peoples, whatever the rest of its nature may be, there is a point at which the legislator is
obliged to rely on the good sense and virtue of its citizens. . . . There is no country where
the law can foresee everything and where institutions will take the place of reason and
mores.”
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CHAPTER 4: DELIBERATION AND DARING:
THUCYDIDES ON LUCK AND DEMOCRACY
This chapter primarily aims to investigate Periclean-Athenian perspectives on the idea of
luck as these perspectives come to light in Thucydides’ History.1 Many perspicacious
commentators on tuchē in Thucydides have caricatured Pericles’ statements on this topic.
For example, Lowell Edmunds argues at length that Thucydides’ Pericles “trivializes”
and “disparages chance,” and that his war “policy as it emerged in the first speech . . .
1 Although the literature on Thucydides’ Pericles is vast, it can be usefully (if somewhat
crudely) split into two approaches. Many scholars hold up Pericles as Thucydides’
exemplary statesman. Among these are Jacqueline de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian
Imperialism, 112: “Thucydides completely shares Pericles’ ideas” (see also 119);
Pouncey, The Necessities of War, 80; Euben, Tragedy of Political Theory, 178; Nichols,
Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 26. Others have argued, by contrast, that
Thucydides is a critic of Pericles in certain respects. See for example, Balot, Courage in
the Democratic Polis, 45-46, 109-28; Foster, Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean
Imperialism, 3-4; Mara, Civic Conversations, 114-16; Ober, “Thucydides
Theoretikos/Thucydides Histor,” 275-76; Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 27-29, 193-
197; Parry, “Thucydides’ Historical Perspective,” 47; Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and
Explanation, 205; Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy, 59-71; Stahl, Man’s Place in
History, 95-96. My study falls into the second group, though I think that Pericles’
deliberative rationality (gnōmē) and his regard for luck (tuchē) are exemplary, for
Thucydides himself, in various ways that I will explain.
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rested on the premise that chance was not a major factor in wars.”2 While Edmunds
correctly argues that Thucydides’ Pericles opposes deliberative rationality (gnōmē) to the
idea of luck (tuchē; see esp. 1.144.4), he fails to grasp that Pericles’ sensitivity to the
appearance of tuchē in war shapes his conception of gnōmē.3 In his so-called War
Speech, Pericles emphasizes the necessity of grand-strategic deliberation as one
indispensable way of anticipating, albeit without eliminating, war’s unlucky turnabouts
(1.140.1).4 Equally important, in the Funeral Oration and in his final speech to the
2 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 17, 71, 74; see also 43, 81, 144. I engage with
Edmunds’s seminal study throughout this chapter. See also Orwin, Humanity of
Thucydides, 25 n. 28, 170; Forde, Ambition to Rule, 60; Foster, Thucydides, Pericles, and
Periclean Imperialism, 205; Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, 35-37, 47;
Monoson and Loriaux, “Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy,” 289: “in order to find
Pericles’ strategy irresistible it is necessary to discount the power of chance (tychē).”
3 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, esp. 3, 147-48. Earlier articulations of the so-called
“gnōmē-tuchē antithesis” occur in Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, 105-107;
Romilly, Mind of Thucydides, 104; Finley, Thucydides, 312-315. On 1.144.4, see the
commentary of Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 40.
4 References to Thucydides are inlaid in the text and refer to the text by book, chapter,
and line numbers as appropriate. My own translations and transliterations refer to the
Oxford Classical Text, edited by Jones and revised by Powell. Wherever possible, I use
the translation of Woodruff, Thucydides on Justice, Power, and Human Nature. Because
Woodruff has only translated selections of the History, I frequently rely instead on the
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Athenian Assembly, Pericles argues that the Athenians’ unique combination of both
daring and deliberation, tolma and gnōmē (2.40.3), empowers them to think and to act
well in the face of apparent good or bad luck. To hear Pericles tell it, the Athenians (and
above all Pericles) can explain to themselves why it makes sense to be courageous amid
what they perceive to be good fortune (2.43.5); conversely, in the face of ostensible bad
luck, their daring steels their judgment and fuels their resistance (2.64.6). In these
speeches, then, Pericles offers a distinctively democratic-Athenian response to the
Machiavellian question that we encountered in the prior chapter: how is it possible for
citizens to eschew becoming either intoxicated in good luck or abject in bad luck?
However, and as we will see, the History exposes the Athenians’ many failures to
measure up to the Periclean ideal of gnōmē. One Thucydidean answer to the
Machiavellian question posed above is that Pericles strategically managed the emotions
of the people through his rhetoric and his quasi-monarchic rule (2.65.9). After his death,
however, the Athenians allowed themselves to change their minds in accordance with
their perceived good or bad luck. In particular, Thucydides shows that the appearance of
good luck provoked the Athenians’ emotions, especially their hope (4.64.4); these
recent translation of Mynott, trans., Thucydides: The War of the Peloponnesians and the
Athenians; and I modify this translation as necessary. Other helpful editions include
Crawley, trans., The Landmark Thucydides, revised and edited by Strassler; and Hobbes,
trans., The Peloponnesian War, edited by David Grene. I have also benefited from the
commentaries of A.W. Gomme, A. Andrewes, and K.J. Dover, Historical Commentary;
and Hornblower, Commentary.
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emotions in turn corrupted their deliberative rationality in ways that I will track and
explain. At the same time, Thucydides marvels at the tolma displayed by the Athenians in
the wake of both the plague and the Sicilian expedition, disasters which the Athenians
themselves regarded as extremely unlucky (see esp. 7.28). Strikingly, in light of their
capacity to withstand serious misfortune, ordinary Athenians may have surpassed
Pericles’ own portrait of Athenian daring.5
Finally, since I aim to situate this discussion of Periclean Athens within a broader
consideration of the idea of luck in the History, the chapter begins and ends by addressing
objections and questions that expand the purview of the argument. For example, could it
be the case that Thucydides favors the Spartan civic discourse on luck over and against
the one articulated by Pericles?6 Moreover, how do Pericles’ reflections on Athenian
thought and action in the face of apparent good or bad luck interface with the
fundamental issues of agency, necessity, and responsibility that recur throughout the
5 In presenting Thucydides as an “entangled” critic of democratic Athens and of Pericles
in particular, I follow Ober, Political Dissent, 52-121; Balot, Courage in the Democratic
Polis, 25-46, 109-128; Saxonhouse, Free Speech, esp. 149-51; Mara, Civic
Conversations, 19-26. By using the language of entanglement, I intend to bring to mind
Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements.
6 See, for example, Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 147; Stahl, Man’s Place in
History, 95-96; Rahe, “Religion, Politics, and Piety,” 432.
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History?7 In fact, before it possible to elaborate and evaluate the civic discourse on luck
in Periclean Athens, it is necessary to offer a preliminary account of this idea as it figures
into Thucydides’ own conceptual vocabulary.
The Idea of Luck in the History
What is the meaning of tuchē for Thucydides, and what role does this idea play, if any, in
his historiography? Influential scholars have often reified tuchē in the History. According
to Adam Parry, for example, Thucydides uses tuchē to refer to “external reality at its
most incalculable, the aspect of it that is least accessible to logos.”8 A central lesson of
the History on Parry’s reading is that “man’s attempt to master the world by the intellect”
will founder on the shoals of “the world,” “outside things,” or “actuality,” which “in its
capacity as luck, will behave in an unreasonable way.”9 Similarly, in a celebrated yet
enigmatic line, Bernard Williams writes that Thucydides depicts human rationality “at
risk to chance.”10 Williams thinks that Thucydides anticipatively stands against the (pre-
7 For contrasting overviews of and approaches to these issues, see Orwin, Humanity of
Thucydides, 193-206; Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 25-28;
Zumbrunnen, Silence and Democracy, 66-124.
8 Parry, Logos and Ergon, 181. A similar line of argument can be found in Stahl, Man’s
Place in History, 95-96.
9 Parry, Logos and Ergon, 181-82, 186, 192.
10 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 164. Williams’s “rationality-at-risk” interpretation has
won many admirers. For example, see Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,”
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Nietzschean) tradition of European philosophy by denying to human reason the power to
make the world “safe” for human beings.11 No doubt, Thucydides starkly displays the
fragility of the human body (e.g., 2.51.3, 7.87.1-2). Virtue is so far from being a bulwark
against corporeal suffering that in certain dire circumstances—for example, during the
plague at Athens and during civil war at Corcyra—the virtuous die first, having refused
to compromise their virtue for the sake of their safety (2.51.5, 3.82.8).12 For Parry and
Williams, extreme bad luck is brutal: it can overwhelm reason and crush bones.13
219-233; Hornblower, Thucydidean Themes 6-7; Hawthorn, Thucydides on Politics;
Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation, 292-93.
11 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 164; see also his “Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” 52.
12 On this point, see Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, esp. 176; and his “Beneath Politics,”
113-127.
13 Additional “tragic” or “pessimistic” readings of Thucydides include: Cornford,
Thucydides Mythistoricus; Stahl, Man’s Place in History, esp. 79-80, 186; Pouncey, The
Necessities of War; Colin Macleod, “Thucydides and Tragedy,” 140-58; Wohl, Euripides
and the Politics of Form, 117; Euben, Tragedy of Political Theory, 167-201; Euben,
“Creatures of a Day,” esp. 30: “Thucydides’s History is a tragedy in the largest sense.”
For a more recent “tragic” reading of the History that rehashes many of Euben’s themes
with the help of Heideggerian philosophy, see Darien Shanske, Thucydides and the
Philosophical Origins of History. For the argument that Thucydides was influenced by
Aeschylus in particular, see Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, 129-73. Williams
suggests, more persuasively, that there is an affinity between Thucydides and Sophocles
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Is it clear, though, that the idea of luck refers to some destructive and mysterious
external force in Thucydides’ own view? True, Thucydides says that unforeseen
calamities of the kind flagged by Parry and Williams appeared to increase in both number
and magnitude during the war: “And things that in the past were reported on the basis of
hearsay, where the actual evidence was rather flimsy, now ceased to be incredible,”
including widespread earthquakes, eclipses, droughts, famines, “and the most damaging
thing of all . . . the deadly plague” (1.23.3). But why exactly did these formerly incredible
disasters engulf Greece at this moment? Thucydides’ explanation is that the war itself led
the Hellenes to invest significance in every striking and irregular event. For example, in
his comments on an earthquake that occurred at Delos just prior to the formal initiation of
hostilities, Thucydides writes that the earthquake “was said to be a sign of what was
going to happen afterwards, and people believed that. And if anything else of this sort
happened contingently (ei te ti allo toioutotropon xunebē genesthai), people started
looking for an explanation” (2.8.3; cf. 2.17.2, 2.54.3).14 The idea of luck preoccupied the
in Shame and Necessity, 163-64. For Thucydides and Euripides, see Wohl, Euripides and
the Politics of Form, 110-19; and Finley, Three Essays on Thucydides, 1-54. I am
sympathetic to these readings, as will become clear, but they often rely on inadequate
accounts of tuchē.
14 I have slightly modified Woodruff’s translation of the line, since he renders (xunebē) as
“by chance,” which should be reserved for kata tuchēn in my view. This line points to the
connection between the perception of bad luck and the pious dread of divine punishment.
In Chapter 2, we saw that, according to Aristotle, many people view luck as “something
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Hellenes because, during wartime, they found every contingent occurrence to be
significant.
For Thucydides himself, however, an earthquake is an event that demands
explanation in light of nature. For example, Thucydides offers a rigorously naturalistic
account of earthquakes on Euboea, focusing in particular on the earthquakes’ capacity to
produce tidal waves: “The cause of this phenomenon in my view is that at the point
where the force of the earthquake is greatest the sea retreats and then suddenly rushes
back with renewed power and so produces the inundation. Without the earthquake I do
not think anything like this would happen” (3.89.5). By contrast, the Spartans view
earthquakes as divine omens or punishments that sometimes directly respond to the
Spartans’ own injustices (e.g., 1.128.1). In fact, Thucydides routinely offers deflationary
and physical accounts of phenomena that his characters attribute to bad luck. Thucydides
identifies the time of both the month and the day as determining factors of an eclipse
(2.28). On the other hand, when the Athenian general Nicias witnesses an eclipse in
Sicily, his obsession with the idea of luck coupled with his superstitious piety leads to his
decision to stall the Athenian retreat, which paves the way for the army’s annihilation
(7.50.4). Most importantly, on the level of the war viewed as a whole, Thucydides
nowhere adduces luck as a cause in its own right. He points instead to the growth of
Athenian power and to the fear it inspired in the Spartans as the critical causes of the war
god-like” (Phys. 2.4.196b6). See also Strauss, “Preliminary Reflections on the Gods,” 89;
Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 88-89.
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(1.23.6, 1.88), while he points to the Athenians’ demagogic leadership after Pericles and
to their factional strife as the key causes of the city’s ultimate defeat (2.65.10-11).
Thus Geoffrey Hawthorn has remarked, with only slight exaggeration, “it is not
he but his characters who speak of tuche.”15 The implication of this fact is that, for
Thucydides, the idea of luck exists “in speech” rather than “in deed.”16 To say that a deed
happened by luck is to offer an account of that deed which implies or presupposes some
background explanation of what counts as good or bad luck. In the History, these
15 Hawthorn, Thucydides on Politics, 235. More precisely, “of the forty occurrences of
tyche in the History only seven are in Thucydides’ own voice.” Edmunds, Chance and
Intelligence, 176. Edmunds goes on to offer a list of the occurrences of tuchē and its
cognates—e.g., dustuchia, eutuchia, dustuchēs, eutuchēs, suntuchia, and various forms of
tunchanō. More recently, Eidinow has added to this extensive list in Luck, Fate, and
Fortune, 122-142. I consider Thucydides’ own rare invocations of the idea of tuchē in the
chapter’s final section below.
16 While the relation of erga to logoi in the History is complex, Thucydides’
“methodological” reflections on his own historiography indicate the superior fidelity and
clarity of deeds over speeches (1.22.1-2). At the same time, Thucydides recognizes that
deeds do not speak for themselves, while speeches motivate deeds. On this topic, see
Parry, Logos and Ergon; Ober, Political Dissent, 53-63; Ober, “Thucydides
Theoretikos/Thucydides Histor,” 275-76; Euben, “Creatures of a Day,” esp. 48-49;
Immerwahr, “Ergon: History as Monument,” 275-90; Mara, “Thucydides and Political
Thought,” 105; and most recently, Jaffe, Thucydides on the Outbreak, 10-15.
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background explanations are lodged in regime-specific civic discourses—for example, on
the topics of luck, virtue, error, and the gods—and in the minds of the statesmen who
articulate and inflect these discourses in accordance with their own characters and ideas.
By rendering the speeches of these statesmen, Thucydides invites the reader not only to
judge their conceptual frameworks, but also to judge the deeds of the individuals and
cities who embody them. How should citizens think and act in the face of outcomes that
they themselves may regard as seriously lucky or unlucky? What virtues enable citizens
to control themselves no matter the appearance of either good or bad luck? Even though
Thucydides himself takes a skeptical approach to the idea of luck, these questions remain
central to his critical political history, because the idea of luck powerfully shapes the
intellectual beliefs, emotions, and deeds of the Athenians and the Spartans—and,
consequently, the evolution of the whole war.
Pericles on Deliberation, Daring, and Luck
Characteristic Athenian perspectives on the idea of luck emerge in the speeches that set
the stage for and partially cause the commencement of the war in 431 B.C. Speaking
before the Spartan assembly and the representatives of Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies
about the impending war, the Athenian envoys, “who already happened to be present” in
Sparta on other business (1.72.1), conclude their speech by appealing to luck: “Before
you go to war, you must realize how unpredictable (paralogon) war is. The longer it lasts
the more it is likely to turn on luck” (tuchas; 1.78.1-2). From this commonplace about the
outsized role of luck in war, the Athenians conclude that it would be imprudent for the
Spartans to open hostilities absent careful deliberation. They warn the Spartans that
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“people tend to go into war the wrong way around, starting with action (ergōn) and
turning to discussion (logōn) only after they have come to harm” (kakopathountes;
1.78.3). The Athenians’ advice, offered in the imperative mood, is to “deliberate”
(bouleuesthe), slowly and carefully (1.78.1).
On the one hand, the Athenians undoubtedly advert to the unpredictability of war
because they aim to persuade the notoriously cautious Spartans (e.g., 1.70.2-4, 1.118.2,
8.96.5) not to invade Attica, but to submit to arbitration instead (1.78.4). On the other
hand, the Athenian envoys state for the first time in the History a characteristic Athenian
perspective on luck. For the Athenians, the possibility of bad luck in war demands action
informed by deliberation. Cynthia Farrar puts the point well: “The Athenians
acknowledge the role of chance, particularly in military conflicts, but emphasize that
human reason can be effective in avoiding the unknowable, risky consequences of war.”17
Also apposite are the words of the Athenian statesman Diodotus: “He is stupid if he
thinks that there is anything other than words that we can use to consider what lies hidden
(mē emphanous) from sight in the future” (3.42.2). Speech alone, if anything, will help us
to clarify the best course of action amid uncertainty and danger.
The most penetrating account of the Athenians’ deliberative rationality in relation
to the idea of luck occurs in the speeches of Pericles. In his so-called War Speech,
Pericles urges the Athenians to support his judgment in favor of war, though he worries
that they will abandon this judgment once the fighting begins. In order to explain why the
Athenians must cleave to whatever course of action they deliberately choose at this
17 Farrar, Origins of Democratic Thinking, 179.
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moment, Pericles limns a complex relation of gnōmē to tuchē. Consider the opening lines
of the speech:
My judgment (tēs men gnōmēs) has always been the same, Athenians:
don’t give into the Peloponnesians. Of course I know the passion that
leads people into war does not last when they’re actually engaged in it;
people change their minds (tas gnōmas) with the circumstances. But I see
I must still give nearly the same advice now as I gave before; and I insist
that if you agree to this as common policy you support it even if things go
badly for us—otherwise you have no right to boast of your intelligence if
all goes well, since events can turn out as stupidly (amathōs) as people’s
plans, and that is why we usually blame luck when things don’t turn out as
expected.” (di’ hoper kai tēn tuchēn, hosa an para logon sumbē,
eiōthamen aitiasthai; 1.140.1)
These arresting lines—Pericles’ first in the History—have elicited extensive commentary.
According to the influential reading of Ronald Syme, for example, Pericles was
“speaking ironically, as befits an intellectual and one of the men of understanding whom
Thucydides admired.”18 In particular, Syme senses irony in Pericles’ metaphorical
ascription of stupidity to events influenced by bad luck. Pericles’ true belief, on Syme’s
reading, is that luck is merely an excuse invoked by those who refuse to acknowledge
that their own stupidity prevented them from fully envisioning and planning for the
18 Syme, Thucydides, 56.
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future.19 Similarly, Edmunds writes that Pericles “make[s] planning primary,” while
“chance . . . is reduced to the same status as human error.”20 On this reading, gnōmē is
capable of overcoming tuchē according to Pericles himself.
In my view, however, Pericles is serious when he says that “events can turn out as
stupidly as people’s plans, and that is why we usually blame luck when things do not turn
out as we expected.” His point is that, whatever happens, the Athenians should judge
their grand strategy by the quality of the gnōmē that informs it, and not by their shifting
fortunes in the war.21 While Syme may be right to suggest that, as “a man of
19 Syme, Thucydides, 56.
20 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 17; see also 81. Edmunds also suggests, on p. 19,
that Pericles echoes Democritus’ fragment B 119, which he translates as follows: “Men
have moulded an image of chance as an excuse for their own ill-advisedness. For seldom
does chance contend with prudence (phronēsei). A quick sharp-sightedness sets right
most of life’s affairs.” As we will see, Thucydides indeed shows that men use the image
of luck as an excuse for their errors, though he doubts that phronēsis can set right most of
life’s affairs by itself. Others who argue that intelligence can overcome luck in Pericles’
own view include Forde, The Ambition to Rule, 60; Foster, Thucydides, Pericles, and
Periclean Imperialism, 205; Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, 35-37, 47;
Monoson and Loriaux, “Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy,” 289.
21 Allison gestures in this direction when she writes that “the introduction to [Pericles’]
first speech opens in fact with an affirmation of gnōmē (reasoning, sound policy), but
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understanding,” Pericles does not countenance pious or superstitious deference toward
tuchē, and while Edmunds is undoubtedly correct to argue that Pericles “makes planning
primary,” Pericles still thinks that it makes more sense to hold bad luck responsible for
the undesirable result of a good plan than it does to decide that the plan was bad simply
because it miscarried.22 Trusting in deliberative rationality rather than in its results will
help the Athenians to deliberate more perspicaciously beforehand and to stick to their
grand strategy in the event of an unlucky reversal. Eschewing the crude view that virtue
necessarily conquers fortune, Pericles invokes the idea of tuchē to emphasize both the
limits of gnōmē and the importance of exercising its full capacity. Like Themistocles
closes with a balanced view about chance events.” See Allison, “Pericles’ Policy and the
Plague,” 18; and Finley, Three Essays on Thucydides, 26.
22 Even if Pericles denies that luck is an external force that acts on human beings in
mysterious and uncontrollable ways, it does not follow that everything that happens
contrary to plan can be reduced to bad planning. Mynott comments on 1.140.1, The War,
84: “amathōs . . . is an arresting choice of word. The core meaning is ‘without learning’
or ‘stupidly’ but it is applied here somewhat metaphorically to events, which in English
we can talk of as being senseless.” See also Hornblower, Commentary, 226. I make much
the same point in my interpretation of Machiavelli in Chapter 3. Virtue is not equivalent
to success for either Pericles or Machiavelli.
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before him, Pericles relies on his intelligence (xunesis) to “see in advance the better and
worse options in a still uncertain future” (1.138.3; cf. 2.65.5-6).23
Contra Edmunds, then, Pericles does not say that “chance [is] not a major factor
in wars.”24 To be sure, Pericles predicts an Athenian victory, so long as the Athenians
eschew hoplite warfare in Attica and focus instead on maintaining their empire and
therewith their massive superiority over the Peloponnesians in both ships and cash
(1.141.2-143).25 Yet Pericles hardly guarantees success.26 In fact, near the conclusion of
the speech, he sounds “a note of caution,” in the words of Ober, worrying for a second
time that the Athenians will allow the circumstances of the war to influence their strategic
thinking (1.141.1).27 While Pericles had initially warned that bad luck could cause the
23 On the foresight of Themistocles, see Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 40;
Euben, “Creatures of a Day,” 38; Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 9-10; Hornblower,
Commentary, 223; Blösel, “Thucydides on Themistocles,” 234-35. Foster persuasively
establishes that Thucydides links the two figures in Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean
Imperialism, 130. See also Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperailism, 119.
24 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 71.
25 “Walls, ships, and cash” are key material constituents of power according to
Thucydides. For this terminology, see Ober, “Thucydides Theoretikos/Thucydides
Histor,” 276-79.
26 Cf. Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 95.
27 On this “note of caution,” see Ober, Political Dissent, 82; Romilly, Thucydides and
Athenian Imperialism, 116.
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Athenians to abandon the Periclean plan, his second statement of this theme suggests,
conversely, that the Athenians could become overly hopeful in good fortune. Success in
the war might entice the Athenians to “take new risks,” that is, to attempt to enlarge the
empire. Thus Pericles’ War Speech raises the Machiavellian question: how can the
Athenians avoid becoming intoxicated in good luck and abject in bad?
The Funeral Oration addresses the first part of this question. For one of the
rhetorical challenges that Pericles sets for himself in this speech is to persuade his
Athenian audience that it would be good to fight and die on behalf of the city, thereby
giving up the “good fortune” of living in democratic Athens (2.44.2). Riffing on Solonian
themes, Pericles argues that “miserable men, who have no hope of prosperity, do not
have a just reason to be generous with their lives; rather, those who face the danger of a
complete reversal of fortune . . . should risk their lives” (2.43.5).28 Because the human
condition “teems with all sorts of unlucky calamities (en polutropois gar xumphorais
epistantai traphentes; 2.44.1),” even the parents of the fallen should believe that “it is
good luck (eutuchēs) for anyone to draw a glorious end for his lot (lachōsin),” as did their
sons (2.44.1). More fundamentally, for Pericles, citizens are motivated to fight and die for
Athens because the flourishing life of democratic citizenship and the demands of war
28 On the verbal and thematic connections between Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the
speech of Herodotus’ Solon to Croesus, see Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 76-84;
Scanlon, “Echoes of Herodotus in Thucydides,” 143-76; Baragwanath, “A Noble
Alliance,” esp. 337. See also Shapiro, “Herodotus and Solon,” 348-64.
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make such action choiceworthy.29 Having seen both the contribution of daring to the
flourishing life of the democratic citizen and the susceptibility of all human beings to bad
luck, the Athenians show an appropriate readiness to end their lives on the battlefield. In
this way they give a new Athenian-democratic meaning to the dismal Solonian dictum—
“look to the end.”30 For whereas Herodotus’ Solon supposes that the individual’s
ineluctable vulnerability to bad luck means that one cannot call a man happy until he is
dead, Pericles claims that the Athenians may cut off the possibility of future bad luck by
choosing to die, gloriously, for Athens. In the Funeral Oration as in the War Speech, then,
Pericles urges the Athenians to rely on their gnōmē without forgetting about tuchē.
Indeed, gnōmē actually requires attention to the possibility of bad luck, even and
especially under conditions of good fortune, which always admit of reversal.
In Pericles’ final speech, his second to the Athenian Assembly, he treats, of
necessity, the second part of the Machiavellian question—the Athenians’ capacity to
withstand serious misfortune. During 430 B.C., the second year of the war, the plague
and the Spartans’ second incursion into Attica weighed heavily upon the Athenians.
29 Balot writes that, for Pericles, “the polis is worth risking one’s life for because of its
practices (epitēdeuseōs), its regime (politeias), and its way of life or character (tropōn)—
all of which have made the city great and its citizens’ lives free and flourishing (2.36.4,
2.38).” See Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 30; and the likeminded interpretation
of Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 35-36. Cf. Orwin, Humanity of
Thucydides, esp. 25.
30 See Herodotus, History 1.32.
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Thucydides observes that for these reasons the Athenians “changed their minds”
(ēlloiōnto tas gnōmās; 2.59.3). In particular, they blamed Pericles and his war plan for
their “misfortunes” (2.59.3)—a turnabout that Pericles had foreseen in his War Speech, at
least in part (1.140.1). Having called a meeting of the Assembly, Pericles describes the
plague as an instance of extreme bad luck that has caused the Athenians’ gnōmē to crack:
“now that you have been visited by this great reversal (metabolēs megalēs)—with very
little warning—you lack the strength of mind (dianoia) to persevere with the policy you
decided on. For the spirit (phronēma) is crushed when something so sudden, unexpected,
and completely unaccountable (to pleistō paralogō xumbainōn) comes along; and that is
what has happened to you, especially as regards the plague” (2.61.2-3).31 Yet Pericles
remains defiant. Bad luck in the form of the plague provides an occasion for Pericles to
theorize Athenian resilience and to demand that his fellow citizens exhibit it.
In so doing, Pericles focuses on the Athenian character itself. For Pericles, the
despondent Athenians need above all to rediscover both their judgment and their daring
(tolma) or courage (andreia).32 Consider the stirring last line of the speech: “The most
31 Trans. Mynott, slightly modified.
32 I regard andreia and tolma as more or less synonymous, since Pericles shuttles back
and forth between the two terms (cf. 2.39.4 and 2.40.3 among other passages). But Forde
helpfully notes that, apart from Pericles, other characters in the work use tolma in
contradistinction to andreia in their characterizations of the Athenians. See Forde, The
Ambition to Rule, 18 n. 5. The whole of Forde’s treatment of Athenian daring merits
consideration.
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powerful cities and individuals are the ones who, with respect to misfortune, least lose
their minds and most stand their ground” (2.64.6).33 Since courage is the virtue
quintessentially embodied by those who stand their ground on the battlefield, at least
according to Aristotle (see NE 3.6.1115a24-35), this line implies that gnōmē and tolma
are, for Pericles, complementary characteristics that enable the Athenians to confront
events that they themselves regard as unlucky. On a more general level, moreover,
Pericles often twins Athenian deliberation and daring, and he champions these virtues as
uniquely efficacious and worthy of pride (see esp. 1.144.4 and 2.40.3).34
However, commentators who seize on the antithesis between gnōmē and tuchē in
the speeches of Pericles often ignore tolma.35 After all, if deliberative rationality at its
33 My translation.
34 On the Athenians ability to unite these two characteristics, which were traditionally
seen as opposites, see Manville, “Pericles and the ‘Both/And’ Vision,” 73-84.
35 For example, Edmunds identifies Periclean gnōmē as a kind of technical rationality,
and he is silent on Pericles’ account of the ethical virtues. See Edmunds, Chance and
Intelligence, 74; Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, 119-120. See the
remark of Polus in Plato’s Gorgias 448c (trans. Arieti and Barrus): “Chaerephon, many
technical skills have been discovered experientially among men by experience.
Experience, you see, makes life proceed by technical skill, inexperience by chance. And
of each of these various men have various shares variously, and of the best things the best
men have a share, and Gorgias is among these best and has a share of the most beautiful
of the technical skills.” See also Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement.
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peak has the capacity fully to foresee and to control future events, then deliberation itself
would be a source of the utmost self-confidence, rendering daring all but dispensable. On
this account, Pericles prefigures the Platonic Socrates in supposing, paradoxically, that all
the ethical virtues represent subspecies of wisdom. One line in Pericles’ final speech
lends some support to this hyper-cognitive reading: “When luck (tuchēs) is not a factor
on either side it is intelligence (xunesis) . . . that fortifies daring (tolman), placing its trust
less in hope (elpidi), whose force depends on desperation, than in judgment (gnōmē)
based on the facts, which offers more reliable foresight” (pronoia; 2.62.5). For Pericles,
courage indeed demands the guidance of judgment—as do all the ethical virtues if they
are to issue in efficacious action. Note, however, the line’s first clause: what happens
when luck is a factor that impedes judgment?
Viewed as whole, the speech suggests that when bad luck threatens to overwhelm
judgment, then daring is critical; consequently, daring must be considered an excellence
of character separate from judgment.36 In Pericles own words: “Remember that the
reason why Athens has the greatest name in the world is because she never yielded to
misfortunes but has to an extraordinary degree lavished her lives and labors upon war”
(2.64.3). In this way Pericles lends support to the Corinthians’ portrait of the Athenian
36 By arguing that Pericles conceptualizes courage as an important ethical virtue in its
own right, I follow Balot, for whom “Pericles develops a composite view of courage that
that requires both a properly habituated character and intellectual understanding.” See
Balot, “Pericles’ Anatomy of Democratic Courage,” 506; and Courage in the Democratic
Polis, esp. 34-39.
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character, put forth in the first Peloponnesian conference at Sparta: “They are daring
beyond their power (para dunamin tolmētai), they run risks beyond their judgment (para
gnōmēn kinduneutai), and in danger they remain hopeful” (1.70.3).37 This Corinthian
comment on Athenian daring is helpful, in fact, insofar as it reveals that daring can cut
against the grain of judgment, not to mention justice. As the quality that animates
Athenian imperialism, and hence the Athenian atrocities committed at Scione (5.32.1)
and Melos (5.116), Athenian daring is an ambiguous and questionable characteristic.38
Yet Pericles himself champions both Athenian bellicosity and the empire, and his rhetoric
in 430 aims to stoke the fire of Athenian daring. By implication, for Pericles, just as
gnōmē can fortify tolma through its capacity to envision possible future outcomes, so too
tolma can fortify gnōmē through its capacity to activate judgment and to transform
thought into action even when terrifying circumstances threaten to become paralyzing.
Note, however, that in Pericles’ final speech he does not simply call on the
Athenians to return to their better selves by exhibiting both daring and deliberation.
Instead he tries to restore their judgment and inflame their daring through the use of his
full rhetorical arsenal—shaming (2.60.4, 2.64.2-3), threatening (2.63.2), and exhorting
37 My translation.
38 See Forde, The Ambition to Rule, 18-19: “The primary effect of Athenian daring seems
to be the empire.” Also note that Athenian atrocities were not restricted to Scione and
Melos. Consider the actions of Paches at Notium, for example (3.34).
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them (2.62.2, 2.645-6). And the speech works, at least “at the level of public policy”;39 as
a direct result of it, in Thucydides’ view, the Athenians “committed themselves more
wholeheartedly to the war” (2.65.2) Indeed, this speech immediately precedes and
supports Thucydides’ portrait of Pericles as a master statesman-rhetorician in the proto-
Machiavellian mold: “whenever he saw them insolently bold out of season, he would put
fear into them with his speeches; and again, when they were afraid without reason, he
would raise up their spirits and give them courage” (2.65.9).40 So powerful was Pericles’
rhetoric that Thucydides says that he ruled the people of Athens quasi-monarchically,
undermining the democracy itself (2.65.9).41 Thucydides also indicates that Pericles
understood his separateness from the demos and his power over them. For example,
Pericles frequently juxtaposes his own unwavering gnōmē to that of the fickle people,
39 “The outcome is success for Pericles at the level of public policy and failure at the
private level. He is fined and removed from office, although only temporarily.” Connor,
Thucydides, 59. But in light of the anger (orgē) that the Athenians felt toward Pericles
before he delivered the speech, the slap-on-the-wrist that they gave to him after it may
count as a success. In any case, Thucydides does not reveal the reason for the fine. On
this point see Gomme, Historical Commentary, 182-83.
40 By contrast, Plato’s Socrates frequently cuts Pericles down to size when he says in both
the Gorgias and the Menexenus that Pericles’ power arose out of his willingness to flatter
the demos. See Plato Gorgias, 515c-519c; Menexenus, 235e-236a. See also Monoson,
“Remembering Pericles,” 489-513.
41 See Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy, 63.
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who cannot control their orgē (anger; 1.140.1, 1.143.5, 2.60.1, 2.60.4-5, 2.64.1). For
Pericles as for Thucydides, then, one answer to our Machiavellian question is that the
Athenians required a Pericles to manipulate their emotions and to balance out their
character—by turns amplifying their gnōmē and their tolma.
Periclean Athens Exposed
Do the Athenians in fact eschew intoxication in good luck and abjectness in bad luck
through the exercise of their distinctive virtues or through the leadership of Pericles or
other statesmen? Thucydides invites the reader to test Pericles’ claims against the deeds
performed by the Athenians themselves. To adapt Josiah Ober’s useful interpretative
framework to my own argument, Thucydides Histor implicitly criticizes Pericles
Theoretikos.42 By highlighting the decay in Athenian leadership after Pericles,
Thucydides suggests that Pericles himself did not realize the extent to which his own
quasi-monarchic rule had rendered the demos overly dependent upon him. Thucydides’
Athens resembles Machiavelli’s Rome: the success of both republics hinges on the
contingent presence of “enlightened statesmen . . . at the helm”—in particular, on the
ability of Periclean or Camillean statesmen to persuade and to lead the people in the most
exigent or unfortunate circumstances.43
42 Ober, “Thucydides Theoretikos/Thucydides Histor,” 275-76.
43 Madison, “Federalist No. 10,” 43: “It is vain to say, that enlightened statesmen will be
able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good.
Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. . . .” See also Strauss, City and
153
At the same time, investigating the Athenians’ responses to good or bad luck after
Pericles reveals the specific failures of the people to adjust to good or bad luck. While
Pericles had said that the Athenians should trust in their deliberative rationality rather in
their shifting fortunes in the war, Thucydides shows that in fact the Athenians often
placed their trust in and took credit for their good luck. In so doing, the Athenians
corrupted their deliberative rationality in multiple respects. According to Thucydides,
conflating good luck with virtue inflamed the Athenians’ hopes beyond the limits of their
power to realize them. Consider his commentary on the Athenians’ unbounded
hopefulness in the wake of their lucky victory at Pylos and their capture of the Spartiates
on Sphacteria (4.39-41):
For such was their current run of good fortune (eutuchia) that the
Athenians felt the right to expect that nothing could go wrong for them,
but they could accomplish the possible and impracticable alike, no matter
with a large force or a weaker one. The reason for this attitude was the
success (eupragia) of most of their undertakings, which was unpredictable
(para logon) and so added to the strength of their hopes. (elpidos; 4.65.4)
In light of their good fortune, the Athenians decline to deliberate, to think strategically
about the war, even as they congratulate themselves and hope for further successes. In
fact, Thucydides reports that prior to their defeats at Delium and Amphipolis the
Man, 153: Periclean Athens “saved democracy from itself and increased Athens’ power
and splendor beyond anything achieved earlier but it had to rely constitutionally on
elusive chance: on the presence of a Pericles.” See also Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 28.1.
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Athenians thought that their eutuchia augured their “final victory” (5.14.1). A similar
dynamic marks the Sicilian debate: Nicias’ attempt to steer the Athenians’ deliberation
toward a sober assessment of material factors cannot quell the Athenians’ intense hope
for the expedition’s success; indeed, it has the opposite effect (6.24). Although Athenian
leaders—from Pericles (2.62.5) to Cleon (3.39.3) to the Athenian envoys to Melos
(5.103)—deride those who hope for good luck, the Athenian people exemplify the
delusive power of good luck to engage hope. Thus Diodotus holds up a mirror to the
Athenian character when he constructs a dynamic relation between hope and good luck in
his account of human motivation: hope attends upon the possibility of good luck, while
good luck increases hope (3.45.5-6).44
Moreover, many Athenian leaders also betray their susceptibility to wild
hopefulness borne of good luck. During the summer of 426, Thucydides depicts
Demosthenes “placing his hope” for the issue of the Aetolian campaign “in fortune” (tē
tuchē elpisas; 3.97.2); in the ensuing battle, he lost one-hundred twenty hoplites, whom
Thucydides calls “the best of all that died in this war from the city of Athens” (3.98.4).
So too Cleon indulged the hope, arising out of his good luck (eutuchia) at Pylos, that he
would end Brasidas’ campaign in Thrace (5.7.3). But the battle at Amphipolis resulted in
the death of six hundred on the Athenian side, including Cleon himself; on the other side,
a mere seven Peloponnesians lost their lives (5.11.2). Of course, it was the hopeful and
44 On hope in the History, see Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 157, 201; Schlosser,
“Thucydides, Hope, Politics,” 169-82; Ober and Perry, “Thucydides as a Prospect
Theorist,” 206-32; Ahrensdorf, “Fear of Death,” 589-90.
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delusional Athenian people who decided to send Cleon to Pylos in the first place—a
“crazy” (maniōdēs) decision in Thucydides’ own view (4.39.3; see also 4.28.3-5, 5.2.1).
Equally important, because the Athenians expect their ventures to succeed, when
one fails instead they mete out severe punishments to both the speakers who proposed the
venture and the generals who undertook it (2.59, 2.65.3, 2.70.4, 3.43.5, 3.98.5, 3.114.2,
4.65, 5.26.5, 5.46.4, 7.14.4, 7.48.4, 8.1.2; see also 6.103.4 for a Syracusan example).
Blame for the city’s misfortunes often falls upon individual leaders, including
Thucydides himself (5.26.5)—no matter the fact that the people authorize the city’s
military expeditions and elect its generals in the assembly (8.1.2). Note the context of the
block-quote reproduced above, Thucydides’ comment on Athenian hope: ten years prior
to the Sicilian expedition, the Athenians exiled two generals and fined another on the
grounds that they had been bribed to leave Sicily (4.65). But the Sicilians had in fact
made peace among themselves in order to expel the Athenians, having been persuaded to
do so by the Syracusan statesman Hermocrates (4.58-4.65.1). It is unclear what the
Athenians could have done with a relatively small force to press their advantage against
the united Sicilians. Considering the failure of the subsequent expedition, in fact, the
Athenian generals undoubtedly made a wise decision to leave.
That the hopeful Athenians punished these generals foreshadows Nicias’ fateful
choice to keep the Athenian force in Sicily in spite of disintegrating conditions.
“Knowing the Athenian character as he did, he had no wish to be unjustly put to death by
the Athenians on some dishonorable charge; but would rather take his chance
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(kinduneusas) and die at the hands of the enemy” (7.48.4).45 The well-known proclivity
of the Athenian demos to react in anger against generals who fail to control the
contingencies of war leads Nicias to take a catastrophic risk. His choice is all the more
striking when one remembers that, according to Thucydides himself, Nicias desired
above all “to protect his good fortune . . . he thought the best way of doing this was to
avoid taking risks and to expose oneself as little as possible to luck” (5.16.1). The
possible annihilation of the Athenian forces in Sicily scares Nicias less than the punitive
Athenian demos. The ironic result is that Nicias is left to trust in luck; indeed, to the end,
when it has become clear that the Athenians will never return home, Nicias issues
pathetic and quixotic exhortations to his soldiers to “remember the uncertainty of war (en
tois polemois paralogōn), and prepare to renew the fight in the hope that luck (tēs tuchēs)
will not always be set against us” (7.61.3).
Moreover, although the demos itself may not grasp when and how it expresses its
own emotions, including its tendency to grow hopeful with the appearance of good luck,
various leaders do grasp these patterns, and they use this knowledge for their own
45 Nicias outs himself as a hypocrite: he had said in the Sicilian Debate, with Socratic
flair, that “the responsibility of office [is] to do everything you can to help your city, or at
least never to harm it knowingly” (5.14). Cf. the words of Socrates in Plato’s Apology,
28d (trans. West): “Wherever someone stations himself, holding that it is best, or
wherever he is stationed by a ruler, there he must stay and run the risk, as it seems to me,
and not take into account death or anything else compared to what is shameful.” See also
Laws 860d and Protagoras 345e.
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purposes. During the Sicilian debate, Alcibiades advises the demos to vote for the
expedition, commanded by Nicias and Alcibiades himself, “since I am in my prime and
Nicias is held to be lucky” (eutuchēs; 6.17.1). Alcibiades began his speech by asserting
that Athens rightly disdains its unlucky citizens, while empowering and glorifying its
meritorious citizens (6.16.4)—an extreme restatement of the Periclean emphasis on merit
in the Funeral Oration (2.37.1). In this context, the mention of Nicias’ luck works as a dig
at Nicias, who was Alcibiades’ personal enemy (6.15.2), since it raises the question of
Nicias’ merit.46 At the same time, Alcibiades suggests, with a straight face, that the
apparent luck of Nicias portends the success of the venture. Although Alcibiades places
his own trust in merit over and against luck, he seems to recognize that the demos trusts
in luck.47 Alcibiades invokes Nicias’ luck in order to elicit the people’s hope. He wants
the demos to vote for the expedition, and he is willing to mislead them to achieve this
result (6.12.2, 6.15.2).
46 Cf. Forde, Ambition to Rule, 82: Alcibiades “seems to assume that great good fortune is
a kind of personal gift, in the manner of those who are said to be beloved of the gods.”
But Alcibiades places his emphasis on the fact that he is axios, worthy of command,
rather than merely eutuchēs, the epithet he reserves, sneeringly, for Nicias.
47 As Saxonhouse has recognized in Free Speech, 171, Alcibiades’ ability to mislead the
demos rests on his superior insight into the Athenian character. See also Ober, Political
Dissent, 111.
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Leaving Athens behind for a moment, an even more salient example of luck used
as rhetoric—in the manipulative, sophistic sense48—occurs in the speeches of
Hermocrates.49 On the one hand, Hermocrates trumpets his own foresight, accurately
anticipating Athens’ ambition to conquer Sicily, and urging the Sicilians to unite in the
face of the Athenian threat (4.61.6-7, 6.33). Thucydides praises Hermocrates for his
intelligence (xunesis; 6.72.2), and events fall out exactly as Hermocrates had predicted.
On the other hand, Hermocrates seems to emphasize the limits placed by luck on the
power of human intelligence: “the incalculable element in the future (to astathmēton tou
mellontos) exercises the widest influence” (4.62.4); “no one can so regulate the outcomes
of fortune (tuchēs) as to match them with his own desires” (6.78.2). The resolution of this
apparent contradiction lies in the fact that Hermocrates defers to the power of luck only
when speaking before other Sicilian cities in his speeches at Gela (4.59-64) and Camarina
(6.76-80). By contrast, the speech that he delivers before his fellow Syracusans does not
mention luck, but instead lays out a grand imperial vision for Syracuse (6.33-34). Clifford
Orwin’s formulation of this vision is neat: “Hermocrates casts Athens as the new Mede,
Syracuse as the new Athens—and himself as the new Themistocles” (6.33.6).50 Only
48 For an account of this distinction, see Eugene Garver, “Deception in Aristotle’s
Rhetoric,” 75-94.
49 On Hermocrates’ rhetoric, see Orwin, Humanity, 163-71; Farber and Fauber,
“Hermocrates and Thucydides.” Cf. Monoson and Loriaux, who downplay Hermocrates’
imperial ambitions in “Thucydides’ Critique of Periclean Policy,” esp. 294-95.
50 Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 167.
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when Hermocrates wants to fool non-Syracusan Sicilians into thinking that the
Syracusans are not contriving to conquer the island, but are merely preparing to repel the
Athenian threat, does he present himself as an ordinary Dorian, fearful of the
unpredictable future. Of course, Hermocrates and the Syracusans were not ordinary
Dorians. Thucydides says that the Syracusans, in contradistinction to the Spartans, “were
most like the Athenians in character and also their most successful opponents” (8.96.5).
What made the Syracusans most like the Athenians was the daring of their ordinary
democratic citizens and the deliberative rationality of their statesmen, especially
Hermocrates.
Returning to Athens by way of Syracuse, then, although Thucydides shows that
the appearance of good luck infects Athenian gnōmē with various pathologies of
democratic deliberation, he simultaneously shows, perhaps surprisingly, that the
democratic Athenians lived up to and even surpassed the Periclean and Corinthian
depictions of their tolma.51 No matter their errors, Thucydides marvels at the Athenians’
irrepressible daring: that they continued to wage war in spite of the ravages of the plague;
that they beat back the Peloponnesians for twenty-seven years; that they undertook a war
of equal size in Sicily; that they continued to besiege Syracuse even after the construction
of the Spartan fort at Deceleia; that they carried on the war for eight years after the loss of
51 Cf. Euben, for whom both Athenian daring and deliberation have become wholly
corrupt by the end of the war; thus Athens required a Socrates for the revivification of its
democratic political culture. Euben, “Creatures of a Day,” 37; and “The Battle of Salamis
and the Origins of Political Theory,” esp. 378-83.
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the Sicilian expedition; and that they might not have been defeated in 405 were it not for
their own civic strife (2.65.12, 7.28.3, 8.1.3-4, 8.24.5, 8.106.5). In Thucydides’ own
words: “it was incredible that in their display of power and daring they could so confound
the Greeks” (7.28.3). In fact, “no one would have believed it possible” that the Athenians
could undertake two wars at the same time, exhibiting the most extreme “love of victory
(philonikia) in each,” until it came to pass (7.28.3). Perhaps Pericles’ conservative war
policy and his fevered, almost hysterical appeals to Athenian daring in his final speech
reflect his underestimation of the daring of ordinary Athenians, especially in dire and
unexpected circumstances.
In support of this point, the eighth book of the History shows that the Athenians
did not yield in the face of disasters such as the loss of the Sicilian expedition and the
revolts of Chios and Euboea (8.1.3-4, 8.15.2, 8.96-97). The Athenian demos exhibited its
greatest daring during these moments of serious misfortune.52 Interestingly, Thucydides
also says that these disasters made the people more orderly and less jealous of its power.
Whatever was necessary to preserve the city and the empire the demos accepted—even
resolving to limit its own power for the sake of good government (8.97.2). In
Thucydides’ own words: “And in the panic of the moment the they were ready to accept
good order in everything, as the people tend to do in such circumstances” (8.1.4). That
the Athenians were able to evince appropriate fear (deos) and hence to control their fear
52 On Athenian resilience, see Balot, “Was Thucydides a Political Philosopher?,” 330-31.
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amid disasters that threatened Athens is a significant fact.53 For the expression of
appropriate fear in response to truly terrifying circumstances is itself characteristic of a
daring or courageous person.54 Perhaps Pericles and other Athenian leaders did not
understand that fear rather than hope was, on balance, “the passion to be reckoned on” in
Athens, since the Athenians indeed struggled to eschew hopeful intoxication in response
to perceived good luck, even as they managed to control their fear in response to
perceived bad luck.55 In fact, because the Athenians’ kinetic energy on the battlefield is
implicated in the excesses of Athenian imperialism, the Athenians’ appropriately fearful
nonetheless energetic responses to disasters nearer to home may present the most
admirable side of their democratic daring.
53 Thucydides’ language of fear (e.g., deos, phobos, ekplēsis) has been traced and
analyzed by Desmond in “Lessons of Fear,” 359-79. On deos in particular, see Edmunds,
Chance and Intelligence, 59-60, 118-22.
54 On this point, see NE 3.7.1115b8-19, Republic 430b, Laws 647c-649c. Consider, in
addition, Connor, Thucydides, 247.
55 The power of fear in the face of disaster to support political order is arguably one
lesson that Thucydides taught Hobbes; hence my allusion to Hobbes in this line. See
Hobbes, Leviathan, 88: “the passion to be reckoned on is fear. . . .” On Hobbes and
Thucydides, see Ahrensdorf, “Fear of Death,” 579-98.
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The Spartan Objection
Some scholars have contended that Thucydides favors the Spartan civic discourse on the
idea of luck over and against the Athenian altogether. In the view of H.P. Stahl, for
example, whereas Pericles “imagines the course of events to be under the sway of human
reason,” the view of the Spartan King Archidamus “is confirmed by the experience of the
first years of the war”: “‘the fortunes of war cannot be analyzed by the mind
beforehand’” (1.84.3).56 Edmunds writes, in a similar vein, that “clearly Thucydides’
method has closer affinities with the Athenian principle of gnome than with the Spartan
diffidence before tyche. But to some degree what the method discovers is the validity of
the Lacedaemonian principle at least from the point of view of the actors in the history.”57
For these Laconophiles, the deeds of the History confirm that bad luck is worthy of both
the Spartans’ fear and their correspondingly severe education in self-control
(sōphrosunē). As I will argue, however, this interpretation whitewashes the Spartans’
confused account of bad luck, while it exaggerates their self-control.58
56 Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 96.
57 Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 147, 183. See also Rahe, “Religion, Politics, and
Piety,” 432; Eidinow, Luck, Fate & Fortune, 128, 137-139.
58 See Farrar, Origins of Democratic Thinking, 185: “the inflexibility and ignorance
evinced by the Spartans is evidently not the answer” to the problems that beset Athenian
democracy on Thucydides’ representation of it. Also, Balot, Courage in the Democratic
Polis, 207-209; Mara, “Thucydides and Political Thought,” 121.
163
The first speech of the Spartan King Archidamus—the most profound apologia
for the Spartan regime found in the History—outlines the characteristic Spartan
perspective on luck. Speaking after the Athenian envoys to Sparta, Archidamus similarly
affirms the unpredictability of war: a war’s “progress is unknowable at the outset” (ouch
huparchei eidenai kath’ hoti chōrēsei; 1.82.6). Notice, however, that Archidamus’
statement is stronger than that of the Athenian envoys (1.78.1-2), and it seems to carry a
radically different implication for action: if the course of war is not merely
“unpredictable,” as the Athenians had suggested, but in fact “unknowable,” then of what
use is the Athenians’ advice, namely, to deliberate before deciding on war? Archidamus
goes on to justify, explicitly yet paradoxically, the misology of the Spartan hoplite.
Because “we can’t work out whose chances (tuchas) in war are better in a speech”
(1.84.3), Archidamus almost denies the usefulness of deliberation altogether. In
Archidamus’ view, the blows of fortune fall so quickly and furiously on the battlefield
that the only adequate foundation for martial virtue, especially courage and self-control,
is Sparta’s austere program of military training (agōgē), which used shame and the threat
of punishment to make a necessity of virtue (1.84.3-4).59 For Archidamus, “the winner
will be the one whose education was most severe” (hostis en tois anankaiotatois
paideuetai; 1.84.4). What distinguishes the Spartan orientation toward the unpredictable
59 See Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 207; Immerwahr, Form and Thought in
Herodotus, 304. Aristotle, Pol. 7.4.1338b11-14: “the Spartans . . . turn out children
resembling beasts by imposing severe exertions, the assumption being that this is the
most advantageous thing with a view to courage.”
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future from the Athenian is, in the first place, that the Spartans “make [their] preparations
in action” rather than through deliberation (1.84.4; cf. 7.67.4).
Yet, precisely because the Spartans view luck as unknowable and deliberation as
futile, their attempts to defeat the Athenians on the battlefield give rise to a comedy of
errors. Recall the first naval battle of the war, which takes place off the coast of Rhium
near the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth.60 The Athenian general Phormio predicts,
correctly, that a morning wind will disrupt the Spartans’ ill-advised circle formation,
allowing the Athenians to perform their typical break-through maneuver (2.84.2). After
the Athenian rout and before the second battle, Phormio delivers a speech to his sailors
that does not mention luck; the initial victory he credits to the experience and technical
skill of the Athenian navy (2.89.3). Thucydides himself shares Phormio’s view,
explaining the Athenian victory in light of “the long experience of the Athenians, in
comparison to the brief training of [the Spartans]” (2.85.2).
The corresponding harangue of the Spartan commanders, however, features the
rhetoric of luck. At the beginning of the speech, the commanders seize on both luck and
inexperience as causes of the Spartan defeat: “most of the luck (tuchēs) went against us
and our inexperience (apeiria) . . . may also have contributed to our failure” (2.87.2). Yet
60 On this episode, see especially the contrasting interpretations of Romilly, Mind of
Thucydides, 80-87, and Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 83-91, which are characteristically
“optimistic” and “pessimistic,” respectively, regarding the ability of human beings in
general and of Athenians in particular to overcome luck. See also Strauss, City and Man,
170.
165
they later deny that bad luck or inexperience could excuse what happened. Courageous
Spartans are expected to stand firm, if not to conquer, no matter the odds: “you should
realize that though all men can suffer reverses of fortune (tais men tuchais endechesthai
sphallesthai tous anthrōpous), the courageous in mind always remain true to themselves
(tais de gnōmais tous autous aiei orthōs andreious einai), and as such they would never
offer inexperience as a good excuse for cowardice in any situation. Any lack of
experience is compensated for by your daring” (tolmē; 2.87.3-4). Even as the Spartans
commanders crow about Spartan courage, however, they do not trust it. Hornblower
notes that “although [the speech] begins by asserting that the earlier defeat was due to no
cowardice, it ends by threatening would-be cowards” with punishment (kolasthēsetai;
2.87.9).61 The Spartans understand neither what caused their defeat in the first battle nor
how better to prepare for the second—apart from amassing many more ships at Rhium
and threatening their own forces.62
True, the second battle initially favors the Peloponnesians: they manage to compel
Phormio to engage in the narrows of the Gulf of Corinth, neutralizing Athenian
seamanship and even capturing nine Athenian ships. Yet, the Athenians ultimately
61 Hornblower, Commentary, 367.
62 According to Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 86: “it is exactly their inexperience in
matters of naval warfare . . . which gives the Peloponnesians the courage to make a
second attempt.” What Stahl must mean to say is that the Peloponnesians would have
withdrawn if they had fully understood their inferiority at sea. In fact, their inexperience
undermines their courage in both engagements.
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recovered these ships and seized six belonging to the Peloponnesians (2.90-92). The
turning point of the battle occurred when a fleeing Athenian ship sailed around a
merchant vessel that “happened to be (etuchē) moored in open water” and “rammed the
pursuing Leucadian vessel amidships and sank it” (2.91.3). Thucydides says that “fear
(phobos) fell upon (empiptei) the Spartans at this unexpected and unforeseeable feat”
(genomenou toutou aprosdokētou te kai para logon; 2.91.4). The Athenians then turned
on their fearful and disordered pursuers. Jacqueline de Romilly comments: “So owing to
chance. . . . the superiority or inferiority of the two adversaries, which until then has been
masked by the exceptional circumstances, is quickly apparent once they must adapt to a
change in circumstances.”63 The combination of Spartan fear in the face of ostensible bad
luck and of Athenian daring, judgment, and skill allows the Athenians to hold their own
in spite of a massive numerical disadvantage.
The interplay between Spartan speeches and Spartan deeds at Rhium suggests that
the Spartan account of luck does not make sense for four reasons. First, because the
Spartans do not deliberate before entering into battle, they often encounter situations that
appear unpredictable to them, even when these situations could have been predicted—
such as the wind and the Athenians’ ability to use it to their advantage (2.84.2, 3.16, 4.13-
14, 5.65-66, 8.10). Second, while the Spartans believe that severe training in hoplite
warfare suffices to produce courage and self-control, which will enable them to remain
steadfast in the face of bad luck, the Spartans in fact lack experience of different
circumstances and modes of warfare, especially in comparison to the active, inventive,
63 Romilly, Mind of Thucydides, 83-84.
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and seafaring Athenians—a point emphasized by the Corinthians (1.68.1, 1.70) and by
Thucydides himself (4.55). The ludicrous expectation held by the Spartans prior to
Rhium was that they would hold their own against the Athenian navy; but their lack of
experience contributed to their fear and incompetence in the event (2.85.2). Third, for all
their ostensible respect for the power of luck, the Spartans seem to think that bad luck can
be reduced to shameful cowardice (4.17.2, 7.18.2-3). When the Athenians seized control
of the second battle by ramming the Leucadian ship, the Spartan commander of that ship,
the aptly named Timocrates, immediately killed himself (2.92.3). Fourth and last, the
cumulative effect of Spartan misology, inexperience, and stigmatization of cowardice
renders the Spartans fearful and dejected at the first hint of misfortune, which they tend to
regard as both inexplicable and blameworthy. According to Thucydides, the Spartans
viewed their first defeat at Rhium as “incomprehensible”; at the same time, they reacted
“angrily” to what they perceived to be a “lack of courage” (2.85.2).
Indeed, although the Spartans claim to respect the power of luck and to cultivate
martial virtues such as courage and self-control that will allow them to withstand the
appearance of bad luck, their deeds throughout the war show that they in fact respond to
ostensibly unlucky events with fear, incomprehension, and guilt. After the Athenians
captured both Pylos and Cythera on the Peloponnese, Thucydides reports these “reverses
of fortune, which had been so many, unaccountable, and rapid, shocked the Spartans to
the core, and they were now afraid that some new disaster might strike. . . . They thought
their every move would end in failure” (4.55.3-4). Thucydides later reveals that the
Spartans blamed themselves for these misfortunes because they had begun the war with
Athens in spite of the Athenian offer of arbitration (7.18.2-3). Consider, in addition, the
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ubiquitous hesitation of the Spartan kings, who repeatedly led out armies only to return
home before fighting; in particular, whenever an earthquake occurred, the Spartans fled
(1.101.2 3.89.1, 5.54.1-2, 5.55.4, 5.60.1, 5.65.2, 5.82.3-4, 5.116.1, 6.95.1, 8.6.5, 8.60.2-3,
8.78).64 These examples bring to light the Spartans’ piety—the true source of their fear
and guilt. The Spartans actually view bad luck as symptomatic of the capricious yet just
punishments of jealous gods; hence their obsession with earthquakes, which they regard
as omens.
Of course, the notoriously warlike Spartans were not simply cowardly at every
moment of the twenty-seven-year war. The Spartan general Brasidas characteristically
exhibits courage—for example, during his climactic, fatal charge at Amphipolis.
However, it is commonplace to observe that Brasidas is the most Athenian of the
Spartans: his daring more closely resembles Athenian daring because it is energetic and
guided by deliberation. Thus Brasidas says to his troops at Amphipolis, sounding more
like Alcibiades than Archidamus, that “the best chance of success in war comes from
clearly identifying mistakes on the part of an enemy and . . . exploiting the opportunities
64 The Spartans also passed up two golden opportunities to sail into the Peiraeus. Of the
first episode, which occurred during 429, Thucydides writes: “it easily could have
happened if they had kept their nerve and if a wind had not hampered them” (2.94.1).
Thucydides’ counterfactual judgment of the second episode is more damning still: in 411,
with the Athenians roiled by civic strife and the revolt of Euboea, the Athenians would be
have been compelled to abandon the Ionian and Thracian outposts of the empire the
moment that the Spartans entered the Peiraeus (8.96.4-5).
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of the moment” (5.9.4). In addition, Thucydides says that, in the view of the Hellenes, the
Spartans lived up to their reputation for courage in hoplite warfare in their victory over
Argos at Mantinea (5.75.3). But Thucydides also gives the victory at Mantinea a comic
aspect. In particular, the Spartans were “shaken more so than on any other occasion in
living memory” (5.66.2) when, at Mantinea, they encountered the Argives in the field.
Yet on the prior afternoon the two armies “had come to within a stone’s throw or a
javelin’s cast” before King Agis had decided, abruptly, and for the second time, to retreat
(5.65.2). What had the Spartans expected if not to fight the next day? In both engaging
the Argives and arranging their troops, the Spartan leaders could not have been clumsier.
In sum, it cannot be Thucydides’ position that the Spartan logos on luck corrects
the Athenian. Against the Archidamian view that the influence of bad luck on human
action renders deliberation impossible one can adduce the efficacious deliberation of
Thucydidean statesmen from Themistocles to Hermocrates and the errors arising out of
the Spartans’ own failures to deliberate. In addition, Thucydides exposes the vaunted
self-control of the Spartans; the reality is that the Spartans respond to the appearance of
bad luck with fear, perplexity, and pious self-castigation. Blinkered by their misology and
their piety, the Spartans err not less but more than the Athenians—though their
timorousness makes their errors less calamitous.
Even so, there is one aspect of the Spartan orientation toward bad luck that
Thucydides may admire. The pious Spartans accept that their own errors have brought
about outcomes that they themselves regard as seriously unlucky. For example, when
Sparta suffers its greatest reversal of fortune, the capture of the Spartiates on the island of
Sphacteria, the Spartan envoys to Athens admit that the Spartans themselves contributed
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to the disaster: “we suffered this reverse, not through any lack of power nor through
arrogance (hubrisantes) that comes from some growth in power, but with no change in
our circumstances, our judgment (gnomē) failed us” (4.18.2). This Spartan speech at
Athens, which mentions tuchē more frequently than any other speech in the History
(4.17.4 (2x), 4.17.5, 4.18.1, 4.18.3, 4.18.4 (3x), 4.18.5, 4.20.2), refuses to draw a hard-
and-fast distinction between bad luck and culpable error. The Spartans’ readiness to
accept responsibility for their own bad luck raises important questions—about luck,
agency, and responsibility—that lie at the heart of Thucydides’ own political thought.
Luck, Agency, and Responsibility in Thucydides’ History
Why might Thucydides foreground the idea of luck? As we have seen, Thucydides
attends to the psychological power of the idea of luck—in particular, its power to
provoke intense emotions and therewith deeds. We have also seen that Thucydides
displays the defining virtues and errors of the Athenian and Spartan regimes as they
confront the appearance of either good or bad luck in war. Most importantly, the deeds of
the History confirm the Periclean view that deliberation about the future can limit the
scope of ostensible bad luck. Through deliberation, it is possible both to prepare for
possible contingencies and to fortify daring—even though the putatively deliberative
Athenians rarely embody gnōmē of this (Periclean) type. At the same time, Thucydides
emphasizes the critical importance of daring: especially in Athens, democratic citizens
displayed an incredible if violent propensity for risk-taking in their imperial ventures and
an appropriate fear of the disasters that threatened the city itself.
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On a more philosophical level, however, by foregrounding the idea of luck,
Thucydides reveals the open-endedness of human action and the possibility of agency. To
be sure, for those who conceive of luck as a force or a divine power that externally
influences human action in ways that human beings cannot possibly foresee or control,
the ideas of luck and agency are mutually exclusive. But for Thucydides, Machiavelli,
and Aristotle, who take a more sophisticated and skeptical approach to these questions,
luck is an epistemic phenomenon rather than a cause of motion or change in its own right.
In particular, Thucydides shows that many instances of apparent good or bad luck are
better understood as instances of contingency or indeterminacy that do not preclude but
rather invite human action. He invokes the idea of luck in order to highlight these
moments of contingency, in which a combination of exigent circumstances, uncertainty,
and human agency together alter the course of the war.
A significant turning point of this type is the Athenian victory at Pylos. Connor
has noted that “the Pylos operation marks a major turning point in the Histories. It is the
first sign of the grand reversal in which the war culminates—the Athenians, at the outset
Greece’s major naval power, ultimately lose their fleet; the Spartans, traditionally a land
power, acquire an empire and develop the navy to control it.”65 In fact, since Cornford’s
publication of Thucydides Mythistoricus over a century ago, the Pylos episode has
65 Connor, Thucydides, 111. Indeed, the Athenian triumph at Pylos and the Athenian
disaster in Sicily dovetail as instances of reversal in Thucydides’ narrative (4.65.4,
5.14.1, 7.71.7). Connor points out that the Athenian generals were on the way to Sicily
when they first landed at Pylos. See also Macleod, “Thucydides and Tragedy,” 143.
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remained a critical touchstone for consideration of the idea of luck in the History. On
Cornford’s incisive reading, “Thucydides represented the occupation of Pylos as the
merest stroke of good luck, undertaken with the least possible amount of deliberate
calculation, and furthered at every turn of events by some unforeseen accident.”66 A.W.
Gomme and Tim Rood have taken the opposite view, emphasizing instead the
“brilliance” and “strategic vision” of the Athenians.67 In my view, however, Thucydides’
Pylos narrative vindicates each of these readings while suggesting a third reading that
absorbs and goes beyond them. For Thucydides, the Pylos narrative illuminates the
possibility of human action undertaken in conditions of material constraint and
uncertainty.68
At first glance, the events at Pylos might seem to have been caused by luck
according to the common-sense view of this idea as something strikingly unpredictable
and uncontrollable. For example, according to Thucydides, Demosthenes’ Athenian fleet
initially put into Pylos by luck (kata tuchēn) during a storm (4.3.1; cf. 3.49.3). Yet
Thucydides also reports that Demosthenes had accompanied the Athenian expedition
with permission from the demos to use the fleet in the western Peloponnese precisely
66 Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, 74.
67 Gomme, Historical Commentary, 488 n.1; Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and
Explanation, 31.
68 For a similar view, see Kagan, Thucydides: The Reinvention, 123-24. See also Sears,
“The Topography of the Pylos Campaign,” 157-68; Foster, “Thermopylae and Pylos,”
185-211.
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because he wanted to fortify Pylos (4.3.2). In addition, Thucydides highlights the fire that
one of the Athenian soldiers “happened to set to a small area of woodland, and when a
wind got up this resulted in most of the woods being burnt down before they knew what
was happening” (4.30.2). This fire afforded the Athenians a clear line of sight to the
Spartan soldiers on Sphacteria, setting the stage for the Athenians’ eventual capture of
both the island and the men. One wonders, however, whether Demosthenes had a hand in
setting this fire. Could it be a coincidence that the Aetolians had previously used fire to
expose Demosthenes’ own troops when they had attempted to hide in the woods of
Aetolia (cf. 4.30.1 and 3.98.2)? Indisputably, Thucydides’ Pylos narrative is defined by a
dynamic interplay between the intelligent agency of Demosthenes and the physical
obstacles and uncertainties that condition his action.
This dynamic interplay between agency and contingency sheds light on the
crucial passage in which Thucydides describes the first battle over the fortification at
Pylos: “So in a complete reversal of fortune (es touto te periestē hē tuchē), the Athenians
were repelling the Spartans from land—and Laconian territory at that—which the
Spartans were attacking by sea, while the Spartans were fighting from ships and invading
the Athenians on their own land, which had become enemy territory” (4.12.3).69 Why
69 On this passage, see Macleod, “Thucydides and Tragedy,” 142-43; Hornblower,
Commentary, 166-67. In the more literal translation of Connor, Thucydides, 111: “luck
had turned about.” See Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, 129, for his comments on this
verb, periistēmi: it “is used elsewhere of reversals of expectation and of tyche (1.32.4,
76.2, 78.2; 4.12.3) and more often metaphorically, of war, fear, danger, or suspicion
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does Thucydides describe this battle as a reversal of fortune? His commentary focuses on
the unpredictable reversal of roles worked by the action itself (cf. 7.75.7). Who would
have thought that one of the most significant episodes of the war would involve the
Athenians defending by land a remote outpost of the Peloponnese as the Spartans
attempted to unseat them from the sea? One possible answer is Demosthenes: although
Demosthenes could not have envisioned the unfolding of the Pylos conflict from
beginning to end, including the fire on Sphacteria and Cleon’s unlikely assumption of
Nicias’ command (4.27-29), he nevertheless greeted these unpredictable and exigent
circumstances as opportunities rather than as roadblocks.
By dramatizing the possibilities of deliberation and statesmanship within
contingent circumstances, as in his account of Demosthenes at Pylos, Thucydides
accomplishes at least three purposes. First, the centrality of contingency to Thucydidean
historiography vividly displays the task of judgment within a chaotic world of motion and
war. On this point, consider that Aristotle disparages the genre of history as un-
philosophic in the Poetics on the grounds that history traffics in contingent particulars
rather than in universals.70 However, in the Ethics, Aristotle writes that all the intellectual
(3.54.5; 4.10.1, 34.3, 55.1; 5.73.1; 6.61.4; 8.2.4, 15.1) than literally (1.106; 4.4; 5.7; 5.10;
7.83; 8.108).”
70 Aristotle, Poetics 1451a37-1451b18. Cf. Frede, “Necessity, Chance, and ‘What
Happens for the Most Part,’” 205: “it is the possibility of depicting events undisturbed by
accidents that establishes the superiority of tragedy over history and makes it a more
175
virtues must be able to grasp “things particular and ultimate” (peri ta prakta tauta
d’eschata; NE 6.11.1143a33). The phrase “things particular and ultimate” seems to refer
to contingent particulars in the domain of action. With regard to practical wisdom, for
example, Aristotle says that it “is not concerned with universals alone but must also be
acquainted with the particulars: it is bound up with action, and action concerns the
particulars” (NE 6.7.1141b15-17). Thucydidean historiography supplements Aristotle’s
own account of practical intelligence, if it does not exceed it, insofar as Thucydides
attends to judgment in its relation to the contingent particulars that call it forth.
Second, as Edmunds, Connor, and others have argued, Thucydidean
historiography provides the reader with a vicarious experience of action under conditions
of uncertainty, risk, and material constraint. To the extent that the reader inhabits the
perspective of Demosthenes at Pylos, for example, the reader may learn that the Athenian
victory cannot be the result of dumb luck by itself. Thucydides therefore reveals the
possibility of efficacious action guided by deliberative rationality even in the face of
circumstances that many people regard as simply lucky or unlucky. Moreover, to the
extent that the reader inhabits the perspective of an ordinary Athenian during the plague
or after the loss of the Sicilian expedition, not to mention the perspective of a Corcyrean
during stasis, he may realize that judgment demands the help of daring, and even of
appropriate fear amid disaster. Even more than Pericles’ own speeches, then,
philosophical enterprise, because it can depict the universal, i.e. what is not disturbed by
the incalculable vicissitudes of everyday life.”
176
Thucydidean historiography delivers forceful and vivid lessons in the importance of
deliberation, daring, and a salutary regard for contingency.
Third, precisely because actors in the History have agency, they also remain
responsible for their actions. To be sure, Thucydides does not dole out specifically moral
praise or blame. But whereas Athenian speakers in the History argue that human beings
are so bound by various external and internal necessities that they may not be responsible
for what they do altogether, Thucydides himself does not hesitate to assign responsibility
for actions.71 For example, Thucydides assigns responsibility for the rise of the Athenian
empire in large part to Athens’ tributary allies, who fell under the yoke of Athenian
power when they chose to contribute money rather than to assist the Athenians on their
military campaigns: “For this state affairs the allies themselves were responsible” (aitios;
1.99.3).
71 Like the Athenian envoys to Sparta (1.76.1-2) and Melos (5.105.1-2), not to mention
Hermocrates (4.61.5), many scholars maintain that it is natural, compulsory, and hence
excusable for individuals and cities to rule to the greatest extent possible. The only check
on their acquisitiveness would be the Diodotean realization that they are bound to be
overly hopeful. See Strauss, City and Man, 192; Orwin, Humanity, 200-203; Ahrensdorf,
“Thucydides’ Realistic Critique of Realism,” 231-265. Cf. Eckstein, “Thucydides, the
Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War,” 757-77. By contrast, my interpretation has more in
common with Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 25-28; Zumbrunnen,
Silence and Democracy, 66-124; Balot, Greed and Injustice, 156-72.
177
Yet the History brings to light how rare it is for the Athenians in particular to
offer honest accounts of their own deeds, irrespective of whether the action in question
turned out as expected. The Athenians often make excuses for their own serious
misfortunes, while they take credit for the unpredictable results of their deeds and blame
themselves or their fellows for actions that predictably fall short of their hopes. If,
according to the canonical definition of Williams, “the basic experience connected with
shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong
condition,” then, for many of Thucydides’ characters, reading his work, per impossibile,
would make them blush.72 In particular, Thucydides focuses his own gaze and therewith
the gaze of the reader on reversals of fortune that explode self-serving speeches.
For example, Thucydides corrects the Athenian civic-mythology surrounding the
so-called tyrannicides, Aristogeiton and Harmodius.73 This is a well-known set piece
within the History; what has not been fully explained is the role of luck in this narrative.
According to Thucydides, “the daring deed of Aristogeiton and Harmodius was in fact
the lucky result (suntuchia) of a love affair” (6.54.1). Whereas the Athenians celebrated
the tyrannicides as patriotic freedom-fighters who killed the tyrant Hipparchus for the
sake of political freedom, Thucydides casts Aristogeiton and Harmodius as ordinary
72 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 78. See also Saxonhouse, Free Speech, 57-82; Balot,
Courage in the Democratic Polis, 34-39.
73 On this episode, see Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 1-11; Nichols, Thucydides and the
Pursuit of Freedom, 171-74; Connor, Thucydides, 176-80; Meyer, “Thucydides on
Harmodius and Aristogeiton,” 13-34; Wohl, “The Eros of Alcibiades,” 349-85.
178
lovers (6.59.1); their attempt at conspiracy, and the fallout from that attempt, were
contingent consequences of their love affair. In particular, the lovers were offended
because Hipparchus, who was not in fact tyrant but the brother of the tyrant Hippias, had
attempted to seduce Harmodius, and had thereafter insulted Harmodius’ sister in public
(6.54-56.1). Seeking revenge, the lovers conspired to overturn the regime on the day of
the Great Panathenaea (6.56.2). However, when they noticed one of their fellow
conspirators talking to Hippias during the festival, they panicked and fell upon
Hipparchus, killing him alone (6.57.2). For Thucydides, the killing of Hipparchus
precipitated further reversals. It was “the misfortune (dustuchia) of Hipparchus,” for
example, to have his name remembered for tyranny, though he never held it (6.55.4). By
contrast, Harmodius and Aristogeiton were praised to the skies by the democracy, though
they did not actually participate in its founding. In fact, according to Thucydides, the
Peisistratid tyrants had ruled with virtue and intelligence (6.54.5); only after the
attempted coup did Hippias turn violent (6.59.2). The crowning touch is that the Spartans,
not the Athenians, ultimately deposed the Peisistratids, paving the way for the rise of the
democracy (6.59.4; see also 1.18.1).
Thucydides’ account of the tyrannicides denies to the Athenians the credit and the
pride that they falsely claim for the rise of the democracy by reporting the unpredictable,
even haphazard sequence of events that led to this result.74 It also calls into question the
Athenians who later convicted and killed many of their fellow citizens in response to the
74 See also Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, 171-72; Shanske,
Philosophical Origins, 75; Stahl, Man’s Place in History, 8.
179
affair of the Herms; for these violent partisans had appealed to the story about the
tyrannicides in order to justify their purge (6.60). For the same reason that he attends to
the causes of the war itself, Thucydides attends to the episode of the tyrannicides: he aims
to uncover the true political causalities masked by false claims and accusations of
responsibility (1.23.6, 1.88). In the case of the tyrannicides, the causal chain is marked by
many unforeseen reversals and contingent occurrences that could not easily have been
predicted and hence cannot from the basis of any justifiable pride in the founding of the
Athenian democracy.
Implicitly, then, Thucydides issues a warning to political actors. While your
fellow citizens may fail to call you to account for your deeds, or while they may celebrate
you for deeds that you yourself did not perform, or while they may be punished for
misfortunes in which you yourself had a hand, it remains open to the historian-critic to
show, precisely, the truth about your actions. Precision (akribeia; 1.22.2) in just this
sense is the hallmark of the History. Thucydides models self-critical honesty about the
past, illuminating reversals of fortune that have been mendaciously excused,
mythologized, or punished. Along with daring and deliberation, then, Thucydides’ own
self-critical honesty is a virtue suited a to a world of contingency.
180
CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF LUCK
Thucydides’ self-critical honesty about the past raises the question of his relation to
democratic Athens. As Sara Monoson, Josiah Ober, and Arlene Saxonhouse have shown,
honesty or frank speech (parrhēsia) was a hallmark of the Athenian democracy: all
citizens of democratic Athens enjoyed the privilege of political speech in the Assembly
(isēgoria) in addition to broader freedoms of thought and expression.1 In Euripides’
Hippolytus, for example, Phaedra hopes that her children will be able to “live flourishing,
as men free to speak frankly/freely (eleutheroi parrhēsia) in the famous city of the
Athenians” (420-23).2 Thucydides’ critical account of democratic Athens shows that he
was “entangled” in the civic discourses of the democracy, including its discourse on frank
speech. But does his critical political history also provide resources for theorizing
democratic citizenship? In particular, is it possible to find in Thucydides a democratic
politics of luck that improves upon the Periclean-Athenian version?
On the one hand, the answer to this question is “no.” Although Thucydides’
Pericles offers his panegyric of Athenian political life, Thucydides himself eschews
utopian thought. Through my readings of both Thucydides and Machiavelli, I have
argued that the idea of luck gives rise to powerful emotions such as hope and fear; these
emotions are not easily controlled, especially in political life. The idea of luck often
1 Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements, 51-56; Ober, Mass and Elite, 296;
Saxonhouse, Free Speech; Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis, 52-63; Nehemas, Art
of Living, 164.
2 Euripides, Hippolytus 420-23 (trans. Saxonhouse). See Saxonhouse, Free Speech, 131.
181
figures into political life as a delusion—or as a rhetorical topos used by political leaders
to manipulate the emotions of ordinary people. Thucydides does not make the quixotic
error of contemporary luck egalitarians: whereas they aim to neutralize the effects of luck
on the lives of democratic citizens, he doubts that democratic citizens can fully control
their own emotional responses to apparent good or bad luck. At bottom, the problem of
luck lies in the ethical beliefs, psychological orientations, and habits belonging to
democratic citizens themselves.
On the other hand, and as we have seen, Thucydides offers resources for
theorizing virtues of democratic leaders and citizens who think and act well in the face of
contingency—even if he himself does not spell out a “democratic theory.” In the first
place, Thucydides shows that luck loves judgment, and judgment luck.3 The apparently
unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances of war demand the exercise of Periclean
deliberative rationality because this virtue empowers leaders and citizens to confront the
unknown future. In fact, Thucydides goes beyond Aristotle by depicting the deliberative
contexts in which gnōmē is either expressed or thwarted in democratic Athens.
Thucydides also displays the particular successes and failures of judgments made in
response to lucky or unlucky circumstances or outcomes through his vividly detailed
narratives and his speech-deed pairings. Thus Thucydides’ artful incorporation of
contingency into his historiography makes it possible for the reader to hone his gnōmē,
which should not seek to conquer tuchē so much as it should seek to be responsive to it.
3 Here I modify Agathon’s quip (quoted by Aristotle), that “luck loves art, and art luck.”
See NE 6.4.1140a20 and Chapter 2 above.
182
Perhaps this is one respect in which Thucydides meant for the History to be both “useful”
(ōphelima) and “a possession for all time” (ktēma es aei; 1.22.4).
Thucydides also provides an education in daring or in appropriate fear that could
be useful to democratic citizens and to theorists of democracy alike. As we have seen,
Thucydides attends to the daring of ordinary Athenian citizens in the face of disaster,
including both their incredible if ambiguous energy on the battlefield and their more self-
restrained fear amid disasters at home. To this extent Thucydides corrects Pericles’ own
hesitation to rely on the daring of ordinary citizens, and he suggests a qualified defense of
Athenian democracy as the regime that best harnesses the daring of ordinary people,
especially in unlucky circumstances.
In fact, on the topic of appropriate fear, consider that Thucydides’ History has an
affinity with Bernard Williams’s work on Greek tragedy—and with the cathartic function
of the Theater of Dionysus itself.4 Williams returns to Greek tragedy because he thinks
that tragedy can help us to confront certain harsh truths through depictions of events that
might otherwise crush us. Referring to a passage from Nietzsche’s Nachlass, Williams
writes: “When later he [Nietzsche] said that we have art [in particular, tragedy] so that we
4 As I continue to examine the role of luck within the civic discourses of Athenian
democracy, I will undoubtedly turn to tragedy. Not only Pericles but also the demos
reflected on questions of luck, virtue, error, and the gods; and the people primarily
performed these self-examinations in the theater. See Goldhill, “The Great Dionysia,” 58-
76; Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, esp. 24; Balot, Courage in the
Democratic Polis, 279; Zeitlin, “Theater of Self and Society,” 101-141.
183
do not perish from the truth, he did not mean that we use art in order to escape from the
truth: he meant that we have art so that we can both grasp the truth and not perish from
it.”5 Whether Williams’s Nietzschean and highly cognitive view of tragedy passes
muster—Aristotle, in his theory of tragedy, seizes instead on its power to provoke pity
and fear6—Thucydides’ History indeed instills appropriate fear of disaster, wrongdoing,
and reversal. To this extent the History could perform the function of the “fear drug”
imagined by Plato’s Athenian Stranger—a kind of anti-wine that makes citizens
intoxicated with appropriate fear, including fear of their own transgressions and
shamelessness.7 Contra Machiavelli, it may not be necessary to have been abandoned as
an infant in order to learn self-possession. As I suggested in Chapter 1, Thucydides is a
political-phenomenologist of luck, not least because he narrates the experience of
extreme bad luck in political life—for example, in his account of the plague.
Of course, the mention of Machiavelli reminds us that the appropriateness of
appropriate fear hinges on its directedness toward justice and human flourishing.
Obviously, political leaders such as Thucydides’ Alcibiades and Machiavelli’s Camillus
did not have such ends in mind; these leaders used the rhetoric of luck to foment daring
for the purpose of imperial domination. Thucydides’ own self-critical honesty about the
past provides a salient counterpoint to the highly rhetorical speeches of these aggressive
and self-interested leaders. Although Pericles had said, paradoxically if not ironically,
5 Williams, “Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” 51. See also Beiner, Political Judgment, 119.
6 Aristotle, Poetics 1449b.
7 See Plato, Laws 647c-49d.
184
that “we [Athenians] do not need Homer, or anyone else, to praise our power” (2.41.4),
because in Pericles’ view Athenian deeds had produced a more concrete and lasting
legacy in the form of the empire, the History shows that the Athenian democracy and
every city could use a Thucydides, a critical historian who speaks the truth about its past.
To the extent that democratic citizens remain readers of Thucydides today, then he can
help them to develop self-critical honesty about their own politics. In other words,
Thucydides can show us more precisely what Aristotle might have meant when he
suggested that political leaders and citizens should be serious and that they should take
responsibility for their deeds.
In these ways, democratic citizens can learn from the gnōmē of Thucydides’
Pericles (not to mention his Themistocles, Demosthenes, and Hermocrates), the daring
and appropriate fear of his ordinary Athenians, and the critical historiography of
Thucydides himself. If democratic citizens were to cultivate these virtues, then they
might become more honest than the Athenians about the limits of the power of the demos
at home and abroad; soberer about the vulnerability of the city to disaster; less inclined to
punish political leaders as scapegoats for bad luck; and equally strong, if not stronger,
when the city is weighed down by serious misfortune. To be sure, such democratic
citizens would not thereby “conquer” luck, which does not even exist as something out
there to be conquered. But would they not eschew intoxication in good luck or abjectness
in bad luck? To that extent, they would deserve our respect—and our wonder.
185
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