It’s Time for History! Thucydides in International Relations: Toward a Post-”Westphalian” Reading of a Pre-“Westphalian” Author

Abstract

This chapter reconsiders Thucydides from an International Relations (IR) perspective. This perspective is interested in the History of the Peloponnesian War as a “possession for all time” (1.22.4), that is, as a theoretical text with the potential to provide significant insights for our thinking about world politics and IR today. This disciplinary interest needs mentioning. As Neville Morley reminds us in chapter 2, modern disciplinary perspectives on Thucydides are already foreknowledge1 conditioning our interpretations in the sense that they entail expectations with respect to what we hope to find in his text. While my predispositions in this regard are thus herewith made clear, this chapter, however, does not discuss “the” theory of Thucydides—or what we might think it is. Instead, it draws our attention to the processes through which we construct meaning in relation to the Thucydidean text. It thus concerns the act of interpretation itself. How can we, and how should we approach the ancient author from an IR perspective?