Gain, Fear and Glory

Abstract

This paper analyses the three causes of war identified by Thucydides and his most eminent translator, Thomas Hobbes. Looking beyond the circumstantial occasions through which wars begin, the chief motives of belligerents have been to pursue material gains, to respond to fears, and to obtain glory and prestige for a doctrine. Wight calls ‘simple Thucydidean fear … the prime motive in international politics’ because it involves ‘a rational apprehension of contingent evil’, not simply ‘some unreasoning emotion’. Wight discusses how fear may be a cause of preventive war, and he labels the great difficulty of building trust between former adversaries ‘the Hobbesian predicament’. Wight defines this predicament as follows: ‘communities of honest and decent men, when they have suffered a long series of mutual injuries, and have a rational apprehension each that its own existence is at stake, and when moreover they live in inescapable juxtaposition, cannot transpose themselves into an attitude of mutual trust’. He also explores the tension between freedom and necessity: the circumstances at hand may seem to be tractable, with choices available between possible decisions and their likely consequences; yet the factors leading to war may prove inescapable.