Thucydides and the invention of political science

Josiah Ober (Princeton University)

Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, November (2005)

Abstract

Thucydides self-consciously invented a new form of inquiry, which can reasonably be called “social and political science.” His intellectual goal was a new understanding of power and its relationship to human agency and the deep structures of human society. His understanding of agency and structure is in some ways reminiscent of the reflexivity theory developed by Anthony Giddens.

It is commonly supposed that Thucydides was, first and foremost, a historian and that his claim to fame lies in his work as a historiographical innovator. According to this view, Thucydides took up the nascent prose genre of history from earlier writers, including Hellanicus and Herodotus, and transformed it into a rigorous and “scientific” discipline. Herodotus (1.1) had stated that the purpose of his Histories was the preservation of memory, “so that things done by men not be forgotten in time, and that great and remarkable deeds… not lose their glory.” Like Herodotus, Thucydides was intensely aware of his own role, as a writer, in the cultural process of preserving memory of the past and he followed Herodotus in presenting a sequential narrative of remarkable past events.

The standard view of Thucydides as a historian has much to recommend it. He certainly regarded earlier Greek practitioners of self-conscious history-writing as rivals: Like the early red-figure vase painter Euthymides, who wrote on a signed masterpiece amphora “As never Euphronios,” by censuring Hellanicus by name for his inaccuracy in regard to dates (1.97) and Herodotus by implication for factual errors, Thucydides situated his work in a competitive relationship with that of earlier historians. But the vase painters Euthymides and Euphronios were participants in what both would presumably have recognized as a single artistic genre, a rule-bounded enterprise in which bold innovation was possible but which also recognized and respected clear generic guidelines. It is not so clear that Thucydides would have accepted that he was working in just the same generic enterprise as Herodotus – he did not describe his text as historian. Indeed, it is not clear that the rules structuring fifth-century prose writing were nearly as clearly defined as were, e.g. vase painting syles or poetic forms. The essential point is that Thucydides’ text seems clearly to break with, as well as to build upon, the texts written by the Greek founders of the enterprise of writing history.

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