Abstract
The most superficial level of Thucydides’ history examines the destructive consequences of domestic and foreign policies framed outside the language of justice. His deeper political-philosophical aim was to explore the relationship between nomos (convention) and phusis (nature) and its implications for civilization.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter was first published as: “Thucydides the Constructivist!”, in: American Political Science Review, 95,3 (September 2001): pp. 547–60. The permission to republish this chapter was granted on xy July 2015 by Clair Taylor, Senior Publishing Assistant, Legal Services, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Richard Ned Lebow was then Professor of Political Science, History, and Psychology, with The Mershon Center, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43201-2602. The research for this text was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and its Bellagio Center. The author is very grateful to David Hahm, Brien Hallett, Victor Hanson, Clarissa Hayward, Bruce Heiden, Friedrich Kratochwil, Peter Nani, Dorothy Noyes, Niall Slater, and Barry Strauss for their generous assistance.
- 2.
All English references to Thucydides in this article refer to The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Free Press, 1996).
- 3.
Nomos first pertained to customs and conventions before some of them were written down in the form of laws and, later, to statutory law. Hesiod makes the first known usage, and Plato later wrote a treatise, Nomoi, in which he suggests that long-standing customs have higher authority than laws. Nomos can refer to all the habits of conforming to an institutional and social environment. Phusis is used by Homer to designate things that are born and grow and can be derived from the verb phuein, and later it became associated with nature more generally.
- 4.
We must distinguish between Greek civilization and civilizations more generally. Thucydides certainly had in mind the restoration of civil society and international order in Athens and Greece. Did he look beyond Greece geographically or historically? Fifth-century Greeks were aware of other contemporary (e.g., Egypt, Persia) and past (Mycenaean and Homeric) civilizations. Thucydides had a clear sense of the rise and fall of civilizations and describes his history “as a possession for all time,” so it is reasonable to infer that he looked to a future readership beyond the confines of Greece.
- 5.
I do not want to exaggerate the parallels between ancient and modern philosophies of social inquiry; there were important differences in ideas and the relative timing of social and scientific advances. In the modern era, advances in mathematics have contributed to modern science and, ultimately, the social sciences. In Greece, the age of mathematical discovery came after these philosophical debates were under way. Athenian interest in mathematics began a generation after Thucydides; Euclid wrote his Elements at the end of the fourth century, and Archimedes made his contributions almost a century later.
- 6.
Well before Thucydides, Greek philosophy debated the importance and meaning of language. There was some recognition that it mediated human understanding of reality and thus constituted a barrier to any perfect grasp of that reality. An attempted solution was to assert that names are not arbitrary labels but imitations of their objects. Others (e.g., Hermogenes) insisted that words are arbitrary in origin and do not represent any reality. Socrates tried to split the difference by arguing that things have a fixed nature that words attempt to reproduce, but the imitation is imperfect, and this is why languages vary so much. Moreover, all attempts at imitation become corrupted over time. Considerable effort went into recapturing the meaning of words and names in the late fifth century, and Thucydides must be situated in that tradition. I see no evidence that he believed in the original meaning of words, but certainly he wanted to restore earlier meanings, supportive of homonoia, that had been subverted. Plato, in Phaedrus, 260b, makes a similar argument when he discusses a skilled rhetorician who convinces someone to use the name ‘horse’ to describe a donkey and thus transfers the qualities of one to the other. He is clearly tilting at rhetoricians and politicians who advocate evil as good.
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Lebow, R.N. (2017). Thucydides the Constructivist. In: Lebow, R. (eds) Richard Ned Lebow: A Pioneer in International Relations Theory, History, Political Philosophy and Psychology. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34150-7_9
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