The Political Significance of Luck: A Thucydidean Perspective

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920952148
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Daniel Schillinger
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 74(4) 986 –997

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920952148

Political Research Quarterly

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What is the political significance of the unforeseen, the

uncontrollable, and the extraordinary—or what many

people would call luck? As observers of political life,

and as citizens ourselves, what should we know about

luck, if anything? One prominent answer to this question

right now is that all “successful” individuals should

grasp that they themselves are lucky—that they are not

mythical self-made men and women but ordinary crea-

tures of chance. Robert Frank (2016) makes this argu-

ment in Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth

of Meritocracy. Frank (2016, 40–68) relies on scholar-

ship in economics and psychology to reveal luck’s influ-

ence on economic success and distributions of wealth.

But his takeaway point is normative. Acknowledging the

role of luck in his or her own successes, the reader of

Success and Luck is supposed to say, in effect, there but

for great good luck go I. Clearly the author hopes that

knowledge of luck’s shaping power will serve as both a

wellspring of humility and a spur to generosity (Frank

2016, 101–102). Frank joins a chorus of writers inside

and outside the academy—from Martha Nussbaum

(1986) to Barack Obama (1995), from Ronald Dworkin

(1981) to Danielle Allen (2018)—who invoke luck as

kind of a regrettable social entropy that stands in the way

of egalitarian distributive justice and healthier demo-

cratic societies.

Without doubting the commitment to equality that ani-

mates these luminaries, I wonder whether their account of

luck passes muster, and whether it offers scholars and

citizens adequate materials for understanding the politi-

cal significance of luck. One gets the impression from the

contemporary discourse that human experience can be

divided into two fields. On one hand, there is the field of

human agency, in which we exercise significant control

over our actions through deliberation. On the other hand,

there is the field of luck, in which events simply befall us

no matter what we know or do. According to Nussbaum

(1986, 3), “what happens to a person by luck will be just

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.” And Dworkin (1981, 293) has encapsu-

lated this view in a memorable image: brute bad luck

strikes, at the limit, like “a falling meteorite”—in the

manner of an unpredictable, uncontrollable, and devastat-

ing external force.

952148

PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920952148Political Research QuarterlySchillinger

research-article2020

1Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Daniel Schillinger, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, 53

Wall Street, Room 308, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

Email: daniel.schillinger@yale.edu

The Political Significance of Luck:

A Thucydidean Perspective

Daniel Schillinger1

Abstract

Contemporary authorities invoke luck to explain the arbitrariness of economic success, to emphasize our shared

vulnerability to disaster, and to urge more generous policy, legislation, and governance. According to Robert Frank,

Martha Nussbaum, and Ronald Dworkin, for example, extreme bad luck can befall individuals no matter what they

know or do. By redefining luck as a psychological phenomenon (rather than as a constitutive principle of the world),

this article challenges the contemporary consensus. My approach to luck arises out of my engagement with the

political thought of Thucydides. Whereas influential interpreters present Thucydides as a witness to the crushing

power of bad luck, and whereas they criticize Thucydides’ Pericles for being insufficiently deferential to luck, I revisit

and defend Pericles’ skeptical and psychological approach to luck, and I argue that Thucydides shares this approach,

at least in the main. The pathological intellectual and emotional responses to apparent good or bad luck diagnosed by

Pericles in his final speech recur throughout the History and influence the evolution of the whole war. Going beyond

Pericles, Thucydides shows that the appeal of luck arises out of a human need to explain, beautify, or lament what is

merely natural necessity, haphazard coincidence, or awful suffering.

Keywords

Thucydides, Pericles, luck, chance, plague

Article