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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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I. THE ANCIENT WORLD

Classical antiquity carried political thought to a
considerable depth while it discussed the problem of
the state as though only one example existed in the
world; but its intellectual achievement is disappointing
in the field of interstate relations. The notion that a
government should ally itself with the power that it
fears the less against the power that it fears the more,
and the idea that a state, when confronted by an ag-
gressor who is superior in strength, should seek an ally,
hardly rise above the level of banality. Neither the view
that small states should combine against a threatening
giant, nor the habit of shifting alliances as circum-
stances change, can be regarded as more than the raw
material of human experience, familiar long before the
rise of Athens. It is only too easy for us to read into
such elementary phenomena a complicated notion of
equilibrium which has become second nature to mod-
ern man.


180

Thucydides, though he does not envisage an actual
balance, may be said to adumbrate a number of maxims
which would have been recognized in the eighteenth
century as part of the complex of ideas which the
theory embraced, e.g.:

You, Spartans, are the only people in Hellas who... instead
of crushing an enemy in its infancy, wait until it has doubled
its strength

(I.69).

Athens is capable of standing up against the whole of
our coalition and is superior to any one of us individually;
so unless we go unanimously to war with her, both as a
body and as individual states and peoples, she will find us
divided and will overcome us, one by one

(I.122).

The only assured basis for an alliance is for each party
to be equally afraid of the other; for the one who wants
to attack is deterred when the odds are not on his side.
... [Athens] was able to lead the stronger states against
the smaller, leaving the former to be dealt with last of all,
after they had lost its allies and had become more easy to
deal with

(III.11).

Some writers have asserted that Polybius gave
“classic” expression to the principle of the balance of
power. But we must take him at his word. He wrote
that “it is never right to help a power to acquire a
predominance that will be irresistible” (Book I, Ch.
83, 4). Though David Hume tried to argue that the
idea of the balance goes back to the ancient Greeks,
he discovered situations which provide analogies for
a modern student, rather than the concept itself, pres-
ent in men's minds as a fertilizing thing. Observing
how the Hellenistic governments failed to prevent the
rise of Rome, he had to admit his disappointment at
the fact that no ancient writer reproached them for
their neglect of the balance of power.

The Indian writer, Kautilya, who seems to have lived
three or four centuries before the beginning of the
Christian era, has sometimes been thought to have had
an idea of the balance of power. But one Indian com-
mentator has rightly called attention to the “scholastic
elaboration” of some of his teaching and has mentioned
other intricacies in his diplomacy which “had appar-
ently much interest to kings and politicians in ancient
India, though to us they appear dreary and obscure.”
Another Indian commentator and translator tells us
that “the text is hard and capable of several inter-
pretative twists.” The Arths'āstra, which must be of
the greatest interest when related to its proper intel-
lectual context, offers dangerous temptations to the
twentieth-century student who seeks to achieve rapid
results and reads the present into the past. Some of
its concrete maxims seem absurdly trite, while some
seem to reveal a mind comparable to that of Machi-
avelli; but some seem not even consistent with the idea
of the balance of power. Kautilya could say: “When
a weak king is attacked by a powerful enemy, the
former should seek the protection of one who is supe-
rior to the enemy.... In the absence of a superior
king, he should combine with a number of his equals
who are equal in power to his enemy.” But even a
passage like this makes one unsure about his apprecia-
tion of the notion of balance.