Would it be better if Thucydides had never written, or if his work had been lost altogether? (Not an entirely impossible scenario, given that nothing of his work was available in Western Europe before the 14th century, and any number of Greek works may have been lost when Constantinople fell). I’ve mused on this before, in the context of the stupid Thucydides Trap idea (which, insofar as it’s a well-intentioned policy intervention, seems just as likely to prompt aggressive war preparations as the de-escalation that its author urges), and one might have asked the same question about the US Neocons and their apparent belief that Thucydides licensed a new US world order, in which the Sicilian Expedition would have the right outcome.
Two things in the last day or so prompt the thought that the Thucydides virus may be truly nasty as well as virulent. The first was the reminder that the gigantic brain behind the Vote Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, is a big Thucydides fan.
Now, either pedantically or desperately, I would note that Edith’s summary isn’t quite right: Cummings wasn’t reading Thucydides in breaks between orchestrating the collapse of British political culture, but rather he was summoned to orchestrate the collapse of British political culture from a break, after being forced out of his role under Michael Gove at the Department for Education – his own Thucydidean exile, if you will – during which he was writing lengthy manifestos about new systems of education in which Thucydides played a significant role. So, it could have been worse; maybe he put all thoughts of Thucydides from his mind during the campaign. But I fear a close scrutiny of his stated views on Thucydides and of his campaign strategy would find an uncomfortable number of connections.
That’s not to say Cummings wouldn’t have come up with such ideas unaided, but Thucydides provides them with legitimacy and authority. It’s the standard pattern, as seen in readers of Thucydides since the Renaissance; one discovers one’s own ideas in Thucydides’ open, ambiguous text, and can comfortably believe that they were always there, endorsed by *the* man who sees the world as it really is. The problem with Thucydides is not his own explicit ideas (which are largely absent) but the powerful sense his text excites that there are concealed ideas that offer the key to understanding, and the fact that the text then doesn’t do anything to rule out such interpretations.
The only argument against what Cummings or the Neocons make of Thucydides is that one can come up with an equally plausible (if not often more plausible) reading, based on different passages or different translations or just a different set of assumptions, that completely contradict theirs. But that doesn’t work, because they simply insist on the correctness of their reading – and centuries of interpreting Thucydides as a hard-line anti-democrat and apologist for imperialism and militarism means that readings of him as a subversive or radical are at a disadvantage from the start. People already know what he’s about – and the fact that Cummings was reading him at all is enough to cement a view of him as an elitist text in power politics.
The other, rather odder, example was a tweet from Trump in which several Twitter commentators saw Thucydidean echoes.
No it isn’t, though some of the elements seem Thucydidean – expectations of a glorious conclusion to wars, for example. It’s a weird statement in any case, apparently melding different sorts of perspectives – criticising the false beliefs that lead people into wars at the same time as making confident assertions of future developments. It sounds like a mash-up of fragments of different policy briefings, all reduced to simplistic nuggets – and perhaps that’s what makes it seem Thucydidean, in the sense that one could imagine him putting such a sentence into the mouth of a character precisely in order to reveal that character’s confused understanding and motivation.
But I also worry that this may a sign of continuing Thucydidean influence in the White House – Stephen Miller is still there, for a start – even though there’s been a clear-out of Thucydides-quoting generals. The Thucydides of Mattis et al was surely the sober, cautious, realist Thucydides, advising against another Syracuse; the danger is that they’ve successfully established Thucydides as an authority, that can then be deployed by others, or in Trump’s one mind, to support a quite different agenda…
Sphinx 
I hope I am not – to too great an extent – occupying the role of the over-enthusiastic and thus sometimes ultimately mildly aggravating student, but I am learning quite a lot from this blog plus the various small bits of further reading to which it prompts me. You may be interested in this review of a book by Graham Allison on Sino-American relations which recommends (wrongly, in the view of the reviewer) that the US should pre-empt the trap not by war but by placating China. Mind you, the reviewer cites a number of significant instances in which the resident power might have done very well to strike first – indeed, seems to imply that this is the norm – arguing, rather, that China faces too many massive existential threats to contemplate risking war, and that, with those able to fleeing China in large numbers, the future may well be synergy and millions of highly skilled workers for the West. Incidentally, having myself just yesterday suggested (via Twitter) to the astonishingly cocksure Corbynista spinner Matt Zarb-Cousin that before he goes instancing the views of Ann Coulter as evidence of the “Left’s” new “hegemony” he might read Gramsci properly “and Thucydides,” I’m afraid I feel some further thoughts coming on about canons, Kundera and, in a broadish sense, “human nature” before we all become utterly innocent (about ourselves) and thus potentially atrocious – and at least totally boring and foolish – commissars. Anyway, here’s the article: https://supchina.com/2017/06/12/no-thucydides-trap/
Thanks for this – it is always a pleasure to have comments on here, not least because one of the things I use the blog for is trying out ideas that may turn into something more substantial later, so feedback very welcome. Perhaps less true of anything to do with the Thucydides Trap; I ranted quite a bit about it when the idea first appeared, and then did quite a lot of reading around when asked to contribute to an online round table about it – but since then, all the discussions seem very repetitive indeed.
It remains an interesting lesson in the *problems* of trying to learn from history, whatever the claims of the ‘Applied History Project’ that Allison has developed with Niall Ferguson. Firstly, you can always find past examples for pretty well anything – and make a specific example mean completely different things (e.g. Allison presents WWI as archetypal Thucydides Trap situation where one might just as easily present it as situation where there is no single dominant power and no single rising power, but rather a dangerous multi-polar system). Secondly, you can always make a case that things have changed too significantly for the analogy to work. Thirdly, even if you can agree on an analogy, its meaning and relevance, there may not be a single obvious course of action – placate China to avoid war, or take aggressive pose to deter war, or prepare for war because it looks inevitable.
For some reason, I didn’t notice until just now that you had replied, and had come up with various explanations from (I learnt with surprise) the beginning of term to potential offence caused. So I’m relieved to find this, and I think I broadly agree. The dread Hegel said something like the one thing we learn from history is that men learn from history, and of course spawned legion hugely overweening and ultimately deadly claims. History is not a science if only because there is no experimental verification – no running it through again, no conceivable sensible way of deciding what factors to rule in or out of a simulation, etc. Nonetheless, for instance, a kind of institutional Social Democratic memory of, say, the various lessons in unaided flight to which Social Democratic leaders in Eastern and Central Europe were introduced by supposed Communist allies in the years after WW2 makes me extremely wary of anyone who gives such people the reins. More broadly, I think there must be something to be said for history as a repertoire of possibilities in something of the spirit of Derrida’s bricoleur’s “toolkit” of concepts toward the end of “Structure, Sign and Play.”
On canonicity, I consider myself something of a liberal (!!), inasmuch as on the one hand I think reform is ongoing (and, in English Studies, was much needed), while at the same time I have both reasons against and distaste for a more “Jacobin” Year-Zero approach. It seems to me that even if we can’t give a full account of them, there are probably reasons why Shakespeare or Milton have proved “patient of interpretation” (one of Frank Kermode’s descriptors of a classic) and, indeed, worth interpreting. Among current critical attitudes, there is a strain of (to quote Tyler Durden in the novel Fight Club) “This is my world, my world and all those ancient people are dead.” Now, I believe in passing on broadly enlightened attitudes, but I also believe in encouraging habits of mind which may conduce to the development of a degree of wisdom (!!!!!!!!!). And it seems to me that these purposes are best served by – among other things – allowing, as it were, the existence of the “classic” not in order to arraign and prosecute – which, now, is all too easily done by students themselves (which is, of course, in itself a good thing) – but to confront complexity and, indeed, confusion. It would be the difference between, say, presenting Dickens as an easily othered “anti-semite” for Fagin, and on the other hand, presenting not just the history of his attempts at reparation (eg Riah in Our Mutual Friend), but also the extent to which the benignity, the human sympathy, the humour and perceptiveness – all the things, in short, for which Dickens is loved – as fully, really there – because the really shocking truth is precisely that Dickens was not some thick old bastard (for that shock I always think of the first time I saw Cabaret, and the close-up of the blonde boy with the beautiful voice who, as the camera pulls back, is revealed as the focus of attention at a Nazi rally). The Kundera I was thinking of is above all the essay “Paths in the Fog,” in Testaments Betrayed and, right now, its very end. A good book may not quite be, as Milton deems in Areopagitica, “the precious life blood of a master spirit” but it may well be the record of a notably intelligent, perceptive, even sympathetic spirit in the toils of inevitable confusion. Once the historical process really gets moving, Kundera says, people
,,,proceed through their lives as one proceeds through fog [I can’t do italics in this context]. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenceless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog [ie. he can only see what is close by]…..Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way…..one might wonder: who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead {Kundera, of course, is Czech]? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?….for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky’s path is to forget what man is, what we ourselves are.
Here endeth ))
Pedantically, I am pretty sure that Hegel said the one thing we learn from history is that people do NOT learn from history…
Correctly, at any rate – and it was what I meant to write))