Geoffrey Hawthorn writes:

Yet old habits can die hard. The ars historica has migrated to the social sciences and been represented as ‘theory’. Thucydides is a prime example. Burrow, however, is right to press his point about the dangers of having a point: ‘Almost all historians except the very dullest have some characteristic weakness: some complicity, idealisation, identification; some impulse to indignation, to right wrongs, to deliver a message. It is often the source of their most interesting writing. But Thucydides seems immune. Surely no more lucid, unillusioned intelligence has ever applied itself to the writing of history.’ It is only therefore the most superficial of ironies that those who do have a message have continued to require Thucydides to provide it. Hobbes, the first to translate him from Greek into English, saw him as a critic of democracy. Students of international relations have recruited him as a model realpolitiker. Since the fall of ‘scientific history’ – of which Thucydides was once hailed as the fount – students of literature have exposed his rhetoric. And now that professional respect for Ranke’s facts ‘as they are’ has gone, there can be a temptation to find in Thucydides an alternative foundation for history itself. It is to this that Darien Shanske responds in Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

Cambridge | hardback 268 pp. |ISBN: 9780521864114