Just before Christmas, I had a most enjoyable time participating in a discussion, organised by colleagues from Historical Studies, of the new History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage – still available as a free download here. In considering some of their claims for the potential usefulness and relevance of history if only it can lose its parochialism and narrow focus and follow their prescriptions, I was regularly reminded of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century claims about Thucydides. Of course, that’s what I do, so it was very interesting to see that the review of the book by David Reynolds in this week’s New Statesman also focused on Thucydides in its closing paragraphs, offering his work as the prime example of a history concerned with the present and orientated towards policy-makers.
I would dissent from Reynolds’ account in a few respects. He follows the conventional but problematic translation of to anthropinon as ‘human nature’ and disparages Thucydides for believing in such a thing, and his summary of the work – showing how disaster in Sicily weakened Greece as a whole and led to its decline and conquest – doesn’t wholly correspond to what is actually in the account; brilliant as he was, Thucydides didn’t actually anticipate Philip of Macedon or the Romans, and understandably saw the failure of the attack on Syracuse as a key stage in the defeat of Athens, not of all the Greeks.
What really struck me, however, and fully compensated for the above, was the entertaining chutzpah of a political theorist telling historians that they really need to return to the ideas of one of the first historians if they want to get their discipline’s act together. There’s an implicit claim here that political theorists have continued to recognise his importance where historians have neglected him (to a significant extent this is true) and that Thucydides represents a better model for historiography than either new historicist microhistory or Guldi & Armitage’s preferred Big History (a plausible claim, at least).
Potentially, Thucydides offers a point of contact between history and political theory, if each discipline is prepared to learn something of the other’s language – though he also, as has been recognised by theorists as varied as Wilhelm Roscher, Arnold Toynbee, Raymond Aron and Ned Lebow, challenges the approaches and assumptions of both. He seems both startlingly familiar and thoroughly alien, and it is striking that no historian or political theorist, however loudly they declare their admiration, has ever actually attempted to imitate his work. Perhaps at last they should, or at least make a serious attempt to consider how his approach might be realised in the present. That would be a radical manifesto, for history and political theory alike.
This is of course extremely timely, as I’ll be appearing on BBC Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’ on Thursday morning, with Katherine Harloe and Paul Cartledge, to talk about Thucydides and his legacy; nice example to demonstrate his continuing relevance, and ongoing debates about how to understand his importance.
Incidentally, flicking back through the archives here, I see that David Armitage might complain that he *had* thought of Thucydides, admittedly in an article in the Grauniad rather than in the History Manifesto itself: https://thesphinxblog.com/2014/10/07/an-exemplary-history/
I *had* thought of Thucydides, Neville! (Though point taken about the slippery translation of to anthropinon, which you caught me on earlier.) Much enjoying your Thucydides and the Idea of History. Wish I’d had it when we were finishing the Manifesto …
I think that’s why I was so struck by Reynolds’ tone of “Aha! Here’s my trump!” at the end of the review. Translating ‘to anthropinon’ as ‘human nature’ is completely conventional rather than slippery, and it fits perfectly with the mainstream tradition of interpreting Thuc in IR and political theory – but it’s potentially very misleading. At times like this I feel I really should get round to writing proposal for book on Thucydides and political theory…
You really should write that book, Neville!
I’ve just finished reading the History Manifesto – its a great book – but it appears to me it raises a real problem in the reception/influence of Thucydides. The book, as I read it, calls for the voice of history to be heard not just in other disciplines (economics, climate science, political theory etc.) but in policy making. That is to say history should be heard as ‘evidence’ in policy debates.
It is possible to say that Thucydides has an impact on ideas of history and political thought. Papers can be written on Thucydides and Strauss etc. But that is not to say that reading Thucydides (or historians who write like him) ever directly influence policy decisions or to propose how Thucydides might usefully be incorporated into that process.
How then do we ascertain whether Thucydides has ever directly (or indirectly) influenced policy, and how do we ascertain if he has ever been used as evidence. Thucydides’ name frequently arose in British parliamentary debates in the eighteenth/nineteenth century but in what context? As a demonstration of erudition? or as (relevant) evidence in policy debates?
It’s not an issue that’s limited to Thucydides. Rather, different disciplines offer (or claim to offer) different kinds of knowledge with different degrees of certainty and universality – I’ve written about this elsewhere, and there’s a really useful article by Ian Morris on the ancient Greek economy that neatly characterises the different attitudes towards generalisation that one finds today. In brief, historians as an ideal type are more likely to emphasise detail and specificity, and more likely to be suspicious of generalisations, than different sorts of social scientists, especially economists – the typical historical line on everything is something like “yes, but it’s more complicated than that”. This may not be inevitable, but it is how the discipline has developed. And that can be a problem in this context, because (I assume) policy-makers are normally a lot more interested in clear, definite statements and predictions than in a lot of caveats and qualifications. I’m reminded of the famous gathering of historians of Germany, summoned by Margaret Thatcher to offer a definitive view on whether a united Germany would be Good or Bad, and the refusal of most of them to engage with such a question. One fundamental question for historians wishing to engage with the world of policy is whether this can be done without sacrificing complexity and nuance – in other words, will we be listened to only if we mimic the confident claims of social scientists to offer simple, straightforward recommendations?
But Thucydides is an especially interesting case study precisely because he has been read in different ways; there is now a considerable tradition of citing him as an authoritative source which provides clear, straightforward predictions about the behaviour of states and the course of wars, but by political theorists and IR people rather than historians. Of course it’s a crude and often misleading interpretation of his work – but it is also true to his stated aims, in a way that the conventional historicist reading is not. This is why I think Th is potentially a challenge to both social scientific approaches (emphasising complexity and the importance of specific circumstances and chains of events) and to historical ones (emphasising the need to generalise and make history useful) – not to mention his implicit challenge to both to take rhetoric and literary form seriously. Hence my continuing belief that Wilhelm Roscher, who tried precisely to develop a historical social science and/or scientific but also rhetorical history on the basis of his reading of Thucydides, is the great lost classic and ‘might have been’ of C19 historical theory…
You’re quite right that this is a problem that is not unique to Thucydides. It might, perhaps, be the case that the classical historians (i.e. Tacitus, Xenophon, Sallust etc.) form their own subset that may be incorporated into policy in a different way from say micro/macro history precisely along the lines of the tension you identify in Thucydides.
I would suspect that looking at this from the policy side, one can (not necessarily does) have their cake and eat it. Advice for a minister or secretary of state is rarely going to be longer than 500 words – and would not mention, I presume, a figure such as Thucydides by name. However, that advice would be annexed by 3,000 words written by a PPS explaining in greater detail the various evidence and other considerations that were taken into account to form the advice. Here the PPS would, no doubt, consider in much greater detail all the issues. Anterior even to that I imagine PPSs would be open to both ‘evidence’ (both quantitative and qualitative) and more philosophical discussions of what is good evidence, what is role of government of society etc. Somewhere in that ecosystem there must be a place for both historicist and social scientific approaches to texts such as Thucydides to be introduced.