Thucydides Roundtable: Daniel Bassill’s comment

I next looked to see if I could find a connection between Thucydides and Machiavelli, which led me to this article. The Influence of Thucydides in the Modern World – The Father of Political Realism Plays a Key Role in Current Balance of Power Theories, By Alexander Kemos http://www.hri.org/por/thucydides.html

This is the first paragraph of the article:

Thucydides, the Ancient Greek historian of the fifth century B.C., is not only the father of scientific history, but also of political “realism,” the school of thought which posits that interstate relations are based on might rather than right. Through his study of the Peloponnesian War, a destructive war which began in 431 B.C. among Greek city-states, Thucydides observed that the strategic interaction of states followed a discernible and recurrent pattern. According to him, within a given system of states, a certain hierarchy among the states determined the pattern of their relations. Therefore, he claimed that while a change in the hierarchy of weaker states did not ultimatley affect a given system, a disturbance in the order of stronger states would decisively upset the stability of the system. As Thucydides said, the Peloponnesian War was the result of a systematic change, brought about by the increasing power of the Athenian city-state, which tried to exceed the power of the city-state of Sparta. “What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused Sparta,” Thucydides wrote in order to illustrate the resulting systematic change; that is, “a change in the hierarchy or control of the international political system.

How this affects us in 2017 is shown in this paragraph:

The impact of Thucydides’ work upon scholars of the Cold War period consists evidence for the relevance of his realist theory in today’s world. In fact, while his Peloponnesian War is chronologically distant from the present, Thucydides’ influence upon realist scholars in the post-1945 period, and in turn upon American diplomacy, is direct. Specifically, the foundations of American diplomacy during the Cold War with regard to the struggle between the two superpowers and the ethical consequences or problems posed for smaller states caught in the vortex of bipolar competition are derived from his work.

In the conclusion of this article about Machiavelli, the author wrote, “In twenty-first century liberal democracy, perhaps there is a little of the prince in everyone: it is only to be hoped that there is more than a little of the people in today’s princely political elite.”

**

In his concluding article on the Zenpundit site, A.E. Clark wrote “What we can learn from Thucydides may therefore be a purely theoretical question, if in fact no one is going to read Thucydides.”

He went on to say “Few have read this book, and few in our time will ever do so.”

I’d argue that few have read any of the articles I put on my hackpad as a result of reading Thucydides. I was motivated to read the book by reading Zenpundit articles for the past year or so, which was motivated by meeting and building a relationship with Charles Cameron, starting in about 2005. And that was motivated by my own efforts to connect more people to the work I was doing in Chicago to help build a better system of supports for inner city kids, by building better support for the tutor/mentor organizations they needed in their lives.

You can see a cycle of cause and affect.

I’m an archivist, librarian, teacher and advertiser. I put these articles on a Hackpad as a way to archive them for myself and for others. I will continue to add to this and hope others join in. I’ve been pointing to these on my Twitter and Facebook feeds for the past two weeks.

**

I’ve been hosting the http://www.tutormentorconnection.org web site and http://www.tutormentorexchange.net web site since 1998 and have been writing http://tutormentor.blogspot.com articles since 2005.

It’s probable that very few out of a planet of many billions of people have ever read any of what I’ve written.

But some have, such as Charles Cameron, and he’s made a continuous effort to encourage others to take

a look. Thus, I’m encouraged, and keep on doing this work.

Maybe that’s my take-away from this experience.

If we make the effort, maybe we can expand the band of brothers that A.E. Clark wrote about or that the writers of the Longreads site are hoping for.

And maybe that will result in helping more of us navigate the times we live in.

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