Politics & Power Quote by Donald Kagan

Kagan’s line is doing something slyly strategic: it smuggles a culture-war argument into an innocuous history lesson. “To some degree” reads like scholarly caution, but the destination is clear. He’s insisting that modern political life isn’t just a set of institutions we happen to use; it’s a civilizational inheritance with an origin story, and therefore with implied standards. By invoking “the Greeks and the Romans,” he’s not merely name-checking antiquity. He’s positioning contemporary politics as a descendant of a particular tradition: debate as a public art, citizenship as a category worth fighting over, law as something more than raw power, ambition constrained (at least in theory) by civic norms.

The subtext is also defensive. In the late 20th and early 21st century, “the West” became a contested term, and the classics were repeatedly attacked as elitist window dressing or ideological cover. Kagan’s phrasing works as a rebuttal without sounding like one: if you can trace your political DNA to Athens and Rome, then the canon isn’t decorative; it’s infrastructural. Politics becomes the “striking” inheritance because it’s where ideals collide with human nature, which was Kagan’s specialty. He spent a career reading ancient conflict not as quaint tragedy but as recognizable pattern: democracies overreach, empires rationalize conquest, leaders mistake luck for virtue.

Context matters: Kagan wrote and spoke during a period when liberal democracy felt both triumphant and fragile. This sentence compresses a lifetime of warning: ignore the classical prehistory of politics, and you’ll start believing your crises are unprecedented, your instincts pure, and your institutions self-sustaining. They aren’t. They’re inherited - and inheritable only if maintained.