Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

In Euripides’ Ion, produced around 414 BCE, the central conflict of the play receives its most explicit expression through the diametrical opposition of passionately held views. These views are expressed at length, but in song and separately, in the monodies of Ion and Creusa. In his opening monody, Ion manifests his devotion to Apollo, his concern with purity and propriety, and his position as an orphan. At the pivotal moment of the play, the Athenian queen Creusa delivers a musical accusation against the god who once violated her and, as she believes, left their infant son to die. Is Apollo benevolent and bright, or violent and uncaring? In the two monodies, Euripides brings together the legalistic exposition typical of agonistic rhesis and the emotionality of lyric song.

This chapter explores Thucydides’ important contribution to the shaping of history as a genre of writing. The discussion focuses in particular on the ways in which Thucydides engaged with other, non-historiographic modes of commemorating the past in the 5th century BCE, a process here labelled ‘meta-history’. The chapter analyses three examples of meta-history in the work: the Periclean Funeral Oration, the Mytilenean Debate and the tyrannicide digression. It shows how these episodes help us understand Thucydides’ claims for the usefulness of his work.

Chapter 10 begins with an overview of previous, mostly telic treatments of play, contrasted with a “for its own sake,” paratelic approach.It discusses juvenile play, then adult play, including the play of animals in the wild.Much of the chapter focuses on language play, and on the function of play in conversation.The discussion throughout emphasizes the intrinsic motivation for play while acknowledging its contributions to individual and group homeostasis.

This chapter examines Nietzsche’s thoughts regarding physically destructive struggle (Vernichtungskampf) and, more specifically, war. I contest the exclusively agonistic reading of his philosophy by showing that throughout his writings Nietzsche gives a wide variety of reasons as to why we ought to value mortal forms of combat. I further argue that many of these arguments are underpinned by a quasi-Schopenhauerian ontology of violent conflict. According to this ontology, the impetus to engage in physically destructive struggle is untransformable. Hence, war is ineluctable because humans are defined by an irresistible drive for violent conflict. The periodic release of this ever-accumulating urge is in Nietzsche’s view socially cathartic, and to this extent enables flourishing. This is problematic for his agonistic readers, however, since they take Nietzsche to be pursuing the transformation of destructive into constructive struggle. My solution to this apparent contradiction is to suggest that Nietzsche’s problematic conception of destructive conflict is for the most part confined to his early writings. As he moves away from Schopenhauer and toward the natural sciences, he reconceives destructive conflict as the contingent expression of a general impulse to overpower others – one that can obtain discharge in nonviolent modes of conflict.

The book concludes with a summary of how the greater part of Nietzsche’s mature thoughts on conflict form a systematic whole. In other words, we review how he can be said to prescribe destructive, agonistic, exploitative and exclusionary forms of conflict under distinct yet compatible sets of conditions. I then survey some of the ethical implications of this study, and gesture toward how, in light of our findings, we might profitably reformulate our conception of conflict. Though I advance a systematic reading of Nietzsche’s writings in this book, I do not wish to give the impression that my reading is free of remainders; I therefore close by highlighting some of the anomalies and tensions generated by my exegesis.

This chapter explores Nietzsche’s endorsement of agonal conflict (Wettkampf). I address three points of contention in the critical literature. First, commentators disagree about the relation of agon to physically destructive conflict. While some claim that the Nietzschean agon is distinctly nonviolent, others maintain that it includes physically destructive forms of conflict (such as war, for example). Second, there is disagreement regarding the social inclusivity of Nietzsche’s ideal agon: some claim that he wants agonal relations to be democratically realized across the breadth of society; others, though, maintain that he confines his endorsement to an aristocratic minority. Finally, there is disagreement regarding the means by which Nietzsche thinks that agonal moderation is concretely realized. Some maintain that such conflict merely requires a self-initiated shift of attitude on the part of the individual contestants; others, however, submit that agonal restraint can only be imposed externally, by means of fashioning a balance of powers within which contending parties are too equally matched to domineer over one another. I argue that for Nietzsche (a) agon is categorically nonviolent; (b) all can participate in some form of agonal contest; and (c) agonal restraint is founded upon a combination of self-restraint and externally imposed restraint.

We begin by surveying a rift that runs through the history of philosophy. On the one side stand those philosophers who denigrate conflict as a burden on human existence; on the other stand those who praise it as a productive, strengthening mode of relation. The goal of this book is to elucidate Nietzsche’s contribution to this debate. With this end in mind, we make a brief survey of the intellectual context that informs his unique understanding of conflict. We then turn to some of the key problems that face us in our attempt to extract a coherent philosophical viewpoint from his writings on this topic. First, his terminology is prima facie ambiguous, and it is often unclear what he means when he uses the vocabulary of conflict. Second, across different texts he can be found to positively and negatively value almost all subspecies of conflict. Third, commentators tend to focus on either the hard or the soft – that is, either the violent or nonviolent – aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy. This gives the impression of there being a contradiction in his normative stance toward conflict. I close by giving an outline of the book and how it resolves these various tensions.

In the long term all art is doomed to become only a matter of taste. One simply likes or dislikes and, depending on one’s musical literacy, it’s possible to substantiate one’s preferences. If we were, at this point in history, to characterise Brahms’s music as did Hugo Wolf in 1890, as ‘die Melancholie des Unvermögens’ (the melancholy of inability), we would appear rather foolish.2 Exactly the same would apply today if listeners, whether professional or amateur, were to concur with the music critic Pierre Lalo who judged The Rite of Spring to be the quintessence of ‘the cult of the wrong note’.3 After a composer’s death all polemics about the significance of his music inevitably gradually diffuse; differing views wither away and turn into differing tastes. In due time broad consensus is achieved on the composer’s importance, as reflected in concert repertoire, programme notes and newspaper reviews. Individual but also national tastes may differ, but, when it comes to Stravinsky, Petrushka and The Rite are canonic and broadly admired, Apollo and Orpheus are OK, Canticum Sacrum and Threni are at least respected, though hardly loved. While shifting cultural values will have their mark on the pecking order within his oeuvre (e.g. his so-called neoclassical works currently seem to enjoy higher esteem than thirty or more years ago), the composer has achieved a solid and undisputed place in the Great Masters’ hierarchy. Public debate as to the qualities of his music has petered out.