Robert Stone is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center. He previously taught at the U.S. Naval War College. His research focuses on Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War for insights into strategic culture and democratic decision making. His writings have appeared in numerous journals, including History of Political Thought, Review of Politics, the U.S. Naval War College Review, and the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Stone’s current book project is Rhetoric and the Causes of War: Thucydides and the Challenges of Democratic Decision-Making, a study of the culture of decision-making in democratic Athens. The book makes the case for a reassessment of Thucydides’s War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians not as a realist text which criticizes democracy but as a constructive resource for understanding the intersection of democracy and strategic culture. The political dimensions of the text––which are too often ignored by scholars of international relations––should productively inform the lessons that we derive from it.
‘The Wise Adviser Trap: Catastrophic Decision-Making in Herodotus and Thucydides’ (co-authored with Emma Lunbeck), Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2023), 417–439.
‘Machiavelli’s Rhetoric of Provocation: The Examples of Fabius and Scipio’, History of Political Thought, 42 (2021), 23–40.
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