Within the weeks after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized energy and declared himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, Karl Marx sat down to jot down a historical past of the current. The aim of this work was easy. Marx needed to grasp how the category battle in France had ‘made it attainable for a grotesque and mediocre character to play a hero’s half.’ A lot of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852/69), because the work can be recognized, accordingly consisted of fine-grained political and financial evaluation. However Marx opened in a extra philosophical vein. After quipping that historical past repeats itself first as tragedy after which as farce, he mirrored upon the position that historic parallelism performed in shaping revolutionary motion:
The custom of all of the useless generations weighs like a nightmare on the mind of the dwelling. And simply once they appear engaged in revolutionising themselves and issues, in creating one thing that has by no means but existed, exactly in such durations of revolutionary disaster they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the previous to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes as a way to current the brand new scene of world historical past on this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.
This tendency had pervaded European historical past, Marx thought, and sometimes served the ends of progress. The cloak of Roman republicanism, as an example, had helped French society lurch blindly ahead in the course of the revolution of 1789. Within the current case, nonetheless, the appropriated symbolism of that earlier revolution served no greater function than to veil a grifter’s energy seize in a extra compelling guise.
Marx factors towards one of many extra paradoxical tendencies of recent political life: the extra instances really feel unprecedented, the extra we attain for previous parallels. We achieve this, nonetheless, not solely to respectable new regimes. Simply as usually, historic analogies are invoked to elucidate, predict and condemn. The previous decade alone gives a trove of examples. Amongst them, the usage of ‘fascism’ to characterise Proper-wing populist actions has generated essentially the most warmth, giving rise to a multifaceted debate in regards to the legitimacy of historic analogy as a mode of political evaluation. However there are others which have occasioned much less self-reflection. In reckoning with the potential of open battle between america and China, as an example, international coverage consultants have routinely likened the escalating rigidity to the Chilly Conflict, the First World Conflict, and even the Peloponnesian Conflict. Equally, within the early days of COVID-19, many handled the uncertainty of the pandemic by turning to the Spanish Flu, the Black Loss of life, and the Nice Plague of Athens for steering. One thing of the type can be occurring in actual time with generative AI. How we interpret the danger that it poses hinges largely on which analogy we favour: will or not it’s most akin to the Industrial Revolution, the nuclear bomb, or – maybe most horrifying of all – the consulting agency McKinsey?
If many of those parallels appear self-evident, one recurring level of reference doesn’t: Thucydides, the traditional Athenian normal and creator of Historical past of the Peloponnesian Conflict. Although hardly a family identify, he has been a favorite of these intent on doom-scrolling the historic report for related exempla. Within the first month of the COVID-19 shutdown, as an example, a lot was written about his account of the Athenian plague that one outstanding scholar deemed Thucydides himself to be a virus. One thing comparable may very well be stated of Thucydides’ position within the viral discourse surrounding Sino-American relations. Ever because the early 2010s, when Graham Allison started referring to the stress on world order produced by hegemonic rivalry as ‘Thucydides’ Lure’, international coverage discussions have themselves usually appeared trapped by the necessity to stability geopolitical evaluation with exegesis of an historic textual content.
Nonetheless unusual Thucydides’ prominence could seem, the custom of trying his method in moments of existential disaster is properly established. Throughout the American Civil Conflict, for instance, his ‘Funeral Oration of Pericles’ served as a mannequin for Abraham Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg Handle, whereas his account of Athenian defeat helped inspire an overhaul of the US Naval Conflict School curriculum in the course of the struggle in Vietnam. In Europe, each English and German propagandists excerpted Historical past of the Peloponnesian Conflict in the course of the First World Conflict in assist of their causes, and troopers reported studying Thucydides within the trenches. In subsequent a long time, outstanding writers in each England and Italy used Thucydides to mirror their issues over the rise of European fascism.
This cultish enchantment has nonetheless come at a price. Whereas many have tried in earnest to wring knowledge from Thucydides’ textual content, others have sought little greater than an historic authority for his or her bathe ideas. Careless glosses and misattributed quotes abound, each within the anarchic areas of social media and in others that ought to be held to a better normal: the web site for Harvard’s Belfer Heart, as an example, which features an apocryphal quote lifted from the primary Surprise Lady film, or on the desk of the late Colin Powell when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Workers.
If this could appear a tragic destiny for any author, it’s a notably ironic one for Thucydides. He was each a vocal proponent of precisely accounting for the previous and a cautious analyst of the textured nature of historic repetition. Immune to simplification and wealthy in ‘unuttered ideas’ (to cite Friedrich Nietzsche), Thucydides recognised that an efficient understanding of the connection between previous, current and future can be each extremely complicated and completely crucial for prudent political judgment. This mix didn’t bode properly for the traditional Athenians, who ended up struggling dearly for his or her mishandling of historic analogies, and it’s not clear that we have now the sources to do significantly better. However we stand to study extra by pondering with Thucydides in regards to the position of historic analogy in political life than by merely pilfering his textual content in quest of such analogies. If nothing else, taking such a tack helps to remind us of the dangers concerned in abusing specious parallels in the best way that we’re susceptible to do.
Thucydides was uncommon amongst classical writers in stating instantly what he hoped his readers would acquire from his work. He can be content material, he says, if Historical past of the Peloponnesian Conflict was deemed ‘helpful’ by those that needed ‘to scrutinise what really occurred and would occur once more, given the human situation, in the identical or related style’ (my translation). The outline nonetheless leaves readers wanting. How precisely such information ought to show helpful is underspecified, and students have lengthy disagreed over what Thucydides anticipated the utility of his textual content to be.
Most assume that Thucydides tried to supply his reader a sort of foreknowledge that might probably translate into energetic management over the politico-historical course of. Taken to its excessive, this ‘optimistic’ interpretation reads Historical past of the Peloponnesian Conflict as a kind of ‘political programs customers’ handbook’, as Josiah Ober put it, able to creating skilled political technicians. Recognising regularities within the historic course of, it’s thought, ought to result in predictive capability, which in flip permits for political mastery. Continuing on this style, Thucydides takes himself to be coaching grasp statesmen able to fixing the elemental issues of political life.
Others detect a extra pessimistic outlook in Thucydides’ acknowledged ambition. They recommend that the teachings on supply are inadequate to supply management over occasions even when they can assist the reader detect regularities within the political course of. Surprising occasions will usually upset our expectations, because the plague did in Athens, and the ignorance of non-experts will usually disrupt the interpretation of technical perception into efficient coverage. This downside can be notably acute inside a democratic context, the place a well-liked eagerness to use bastardised variations of such insights might even make issues worse. On this interpretation, Thucydides is ‘helpful’ to the extent that he can mood the ambitions of these wishing to impose rational order onto political life. The perfect we are able to hope for, it appears, is to minimise our self-harm.
We should learn to select the best parallels if we’re to guage properly in politics
At concern between these two interpretive poles is the essential presumption of utilized social science: to what extent can the popularity of recurring patterns translate into efficient political coverage? But, Thucydides was not writing social science as we all know it. To the extent that his textual content articulated something like basic legal guidelines of political behaviour, it did so by means of exemplary cases and thoroughly curated parallelisms. The Peloponnesian Conflict served as a paradigmatic occasion for Thucydides: a specific occasion that exposed normal truths. It served this consultant position, nonetheless, not as a result of it was typical. Somewhat, it was exemplary as a result of it was uniquely ‘nice’. The struggle would show helpful, in different phrases, not due to historical past’s strict repetition, however by the being pregnant of similarity and the reader’s skill to parse analogies successfully.
Thucydides colleges his readers in simply how tough such acts of analogical interpretation may be. A sequence of fastidiously thought of verbal parallels, or what Jacqueline de Romilly has called fils conducteurs (‘guiding threads’), lengthen by means of Thucydides’ narrative like an internet, ensnaring the reader in a continuing and, at instances, overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Generally, repetitions level in direction of vital explanatory insights. However in addition they recommend likenesses that may lead the reader astray. Repeatedly, Thucydides confounds the expectations he has created. Even upon rereading, one can really feel an inner rigidity between what one is aware of to be the case and what one is nonetheless led to count on will occur. Whether or not it’s your first or your fifteenth learn, you possibly can nonetheless catch your self pondering: this time absolutely Athens will win.
The evident lesson behind all of that is that we should learn to select the best parallels if we’re to guage properly in politics. However Thucydides additionally knew that we didn’t have full management of the analogies that form our deliberations, particularly in public life. Our analogical vocabulary is woven instantly into the cultural cloth, a product of the contingencies that form collective reminiscence. We select them not more than we select the language we communicate. (As soon as once more, Marx: ‘Males make their very own historical past, however they don’t make it simply as they please; they don’t make it underneath circumstances chosen by themselves, however underneath circumstances instantly encountered, given and transmitted from the previous.’) Some occasions, such because the Persian Wars in Thucydides’ day or the Second World Conflict in our personal, merely loom too giant to keep away from, and we’re simply held captive by the emotional weight of their cultural significance. Thucydides measured this gravitational pull additionally by way of ‘greatness’, an idea that he recognized carefully with the manufacturing of collective trauma.
The hazard inherent on this, in fact, is that emotional resonance is commonly a poor information to explanatory energy. Essentially the most instantly compelling analogies can show deeply deceptive. Essentially the most haunting Thucydidean parallelism to focus on this level happens by means of the phrase ‘few out of many returned dwelling once more’. Thucydides repeats this line thrice, every to memorialise a harrowing navy defeat: two huge Athenian expeditions, first to Egypt after which to Sicily, and a shock assault that caught a whole military of Ambraciots asleep of their beds. Thucydides’ verbal repetition tempts the reader into seeing these occasions as a similar set. But the final of those to happen, the Sicilian catastrophe, couldn’t have been prevented by studying the teachings of the earlier two. Fairly the other. Somewhat than undergo from neglect by the metropole, because the Egyptian Expedition had, the Sicilian Expedition failed largely because of the metropolis’s miscalculated interventions. Somewhat than revenue from the inventive generalship of Demosthenes, which had confirmed decisive within the victory over the Ambraciots, his arrival in Sicily solely additional exacerbated the carnage.
The seductive pull of ‘nice’ occasions isn’t an incidental hazard to the usage of historic analogies. If historians are inclined to debate the enchantment of those parallels primarily by way of their explanatory worth, the motive behind their day-to-day use is arguably extra visceral. Analogies serve extra as autos for producing awe and outrage than for unearthing extra nuanced understandings. But, even when used merely as rhetorical instruments, they’ll carry critical diagnostic implications.
These implications aren’t all the time detrimental. Figurative rhetoric can use the sources of collective reminiscence to maneuver individuals towards higher coverage when explanatory traction aligns with affective resonance. Thucydides’ Pericles seems exemplary of this. Early within the struggle, the celebrated Athenian chief faces a crowd wearied by plague and the overall miseries of struggle. In an try to metal their resolve, he attracts on two coordinated analogies. Within the first, he describes the Athenian battle by way of a Greek hero overcoming labours within the pursuit of glory. Within the second, he likens the democracy’s empire to a tyranny that, in defeat, should confront the widespread hatred it has incurred.
In paralleling the Athenians to 2 of essentially the most provocative figures within the Greek creativeness, Pericles goads the individuals again to their authentic resolve with the alternating spikes of satisfaction and worry. And he does so perceptively. Thucydides attracts on the identical analogical fashions when characterising Athenian energy and political tradition within the opening pages of Historical past of the Peloponnesian Conflict. It’s to Pericles’ additional credit score that he doesn’t merely discard the analogies after they’ve served his rapid functions. Somewhat, the necessity to stability the ‘heroic’ and ‘tyrannical’ parts of the imperial democracy serves as a framing precedence for his whole struggle technique – a technique that Thucydides himself explicitly praises.
This isn’t to say that Periclean coverage doesn’t show pricey for the Athenians. It serves to boost the devastation of the plague by demanding that the Athenians crowd collectively behind their metropolis partitions, thereby exacerbating Athenian deaths. However the prices of this coverage don’t come up from Pericles’ misuse of analogical rhetoric. The expertise of the plague solely proves a degree that ought to already be apparent, particularly, that utilizing analogies properly can not save us from forces past our management. Elsewhere, nonetheless, Thucydides makes it clear that the misuse of analogies can really invite catastrophes on par with these suffered by probability.
A false model of the story weighed closely on the minds of the Athenians as they made a sequence of unhealthy selections
Nowhere is that this message extra clearly drawn than in Athens’ climactic defeat in Sicily. The toll of this catastrophe is difficult to overstate: not solely did Athenian casualties strategy these of the plague, the mishap so shook town’s religion in well-liked rule that an oligarchy quickly displaced the democracy in its aftermath. Many occasions contributed to this grim end result. But Thucydides’ personal clarification of why the expedition failed started with a narrative about an occasion that had occurred almost a century earlier than the Athenian fleet set sail.
Harmodius and Aristogeiton have been towering figures in Athenian civic legend. As ‘the Tyrannicides’, they have been credited with placing an finish to Athenian despotism and instigating the transition in direction of democracy. For this, they have been heroised and memorialised with unparalleled reverence. And but, Thucydides tells his reader, their popularity was based mostly on a basic misunderstanding of what they’d really accomplished. Removed from being civic benefactors and even tyrannicides, Thucydides reveals, they’d murdered the tyrant’s youthful brother in a romantic rivalry gone mistaken. The results of this homicide have been devastating: the beforehand beneficent ruler spiralled into paranoia, leading to more and more harsh remedy of the Athenian individuals.
Athenian lore had gotten all the things backward: the so-called Tyrannicides, removed from saving town from despotism in an act of self-sacrifice, had prompted this despotic flip for eminently private causes. Nonetheless, it was this false model of the story that weighed closely on the minds of the Athenians as they made a sequence of unhealthy selections within the early days of the Sicilian Expedition. It didn’t achieve this unprompted. Somewhat, this misunderstanding proved a great tool amongst aspiring elite leaders inside Athens, every of whom was wanting to clear a path for their very own ascent. Standing in the best way of most, nonetheless, was the Sicilian Expedition’s most proficient normal, a brash and charismatic chief named Alcibiades. When a sequence of sacrilegious acts occurred on the eve of the expedition, Alcibiades’ rivals pushed the (false) Tyrannicide parallel, prompt a tyrannical coup was afoot, and implicated Alcibiades. There was no proof for this, however within the resultant hysteria it didn’t matter. Confronted with sure prosecution, Alcibiades defected to Sparta, turning the tide of struggle in opposition to Athens.
This elite manipulation of well-liked misunderstanding successfully inverts Pericles’ constructive use of heroic and tyrannical parallels. By portray Alcibiades as a possible tyrant, his opponents simply conjured up an exaggerated state of worry that allowed them to attain their personal ends on the expense of town. Ultimately, Thucydides reveals that the analogy between previous and current was certainly illuminating: private rivalries as soon as once more led to civic casualties that resulted in brutal and self-undermining politics. However the price of this collective delusion would grow to be clear solely later. Hindered by more and more poor generalship and an opponent emboldened by Spartan assist, ‘few out of many’ would make it dwelling from Sicily, and Athens would quickly devolve into civil struggle.
In Might 1861, Marx discovered himself more and more depressed in regards to the American Civil Conflict. The perfect he might do to mitigate his low temper, he instructed a good friend, was to learn Thucydides. ‘These ancients,’ he defined, ‘all the time stay new.’ They achieve this, we’d add, by ceaselessly remaining outdated, thereby creating the house we have to discover ourselves within the distinction.
It’s tempting to see Thucydides’ digression in regards to the tyrannicide analogy as the important thing to understanding his historic technique. Had the Athenians solely understood the reality of their very own historical past, we’d suppose, they wouldn’t have made such straightforward prey for self-serving politicians. On this vein, Thucydides’ challenge might appear to be that of saving future generations from comparable errors. Because the ‘biggest’ battle to ever beset the Greeks, distinctive in each its glory and its trauma, the Peloponnesian Conflict would quickly usurp the Tyrannicides and the Trojan Conflict because the privileged supply of political analogy. As such, it promised unparalleled sources for anybody attempting to influence others to their trigger. It’s affordable to suppose that Thucydides anticipated his work to hinder the power of unhealthy actors to abuse this energy. On the identical time, it’s unclear simply how far it was in his skill to take action. The Athenians, in spite of everything, had all the things they wanted to understand the reality in regards to the Tyrannicides. What they lacked was the desire to scrutinise one thing that they felt to be intuitively appropriate. Thucydides might give posterity an account of the Peloponnesian Conflict which may cease it from changing into fodder for false parallels if thought of fastidiously. However he couldn’t thereby forestall opportunists from establishing deceptive analogies on its again.
Approaching Thucydides’ textual content from the angle of historic analogy doesn’t resolve the age-old disagreement between his optimistic and pessimistic readers. It might nonetheless encourage us to recognise {that a} extra life like strategy to political company should exist someplace between these two poles. Thucydides intimates that the cautious artwork of drawing becoming analogies, honed as it could be by means of the diligent research of political historical past, will help some to suppose extra clearly in regards to the current. However mastering this artwork shouldn’t be confused with political mastery. The ability of ‘nice’ occasions will stay too simply harnessed, and too arduous to regulate, to serve solely those that are clear-headed and well-intentioned. Specious analogies will stay a hazard for so long as individuals stand to learn from them, and their emotional pull will proceed to knock even essentially the most astute off stability. And but, if there’s little probability that political life will ever be free of distortive pondering, it could nonetheless show much less hazardous for individuals who look towards historical past as one thing greater than a sourcebook of handy parallels.
