Read on Twitter
Okay, okay, I'll do it.
People of Twitter, it's time we talked about the curious relationship IR has with Thucydides. It's time to talk about the Thucydides Function. Because these surface readings of TPW are important, I think. https://twitter.com/NevilleMorley/status/1288816352799727620
People of Twitter, it's time we talked about the curious relationship IR has with Thucydides. It's time to talk about the Thucydides Function. Because these surface readings of TPW are important, I think. https://twitter.com/NevilleMorley/status/1288816352799727620
So, when I said that assigning Thucydides serves a disciplining purpose, I mean this in two distinct ways: the ways in which references to TPW can characterize the discipline of academic IR, but also the practice of training would-be IR scholars to speak IR in a certain way.
Many references to TPW feel like something between a sort of ritual genuflection and just plain bad writing. I've joked that "Ever since the days of Thucydides" is the IR equivalent of "It was a dark and stormy night." Its a signifier of IR as genre lit.
Now, when we note that most references to Thucydides in IR aren't careful engagements, we're not exposing some deeply-hidden secret. We're saying something that everybody who's been assigned the Melian dialogue seven times already knows. So what's really going on here?
I think (in the first sense of discipline) these ritual citations to Thucydides constitute a discursive practice that, knowingly or unknowingly, participates in the desire to point to a common ground for the discipline -- to be able to speak of "IR" as a thing.
This desire, when made manifest in the ritual citation to a bowdlerized Thucydides, enacts what I like to call the "Thucydides Function." There are two important effects from this function: a membership effect and a continuity effect.
(Neither has much of anything to do with what Thucydides wrote in his history. What I'm sharing with you now isn't really about Thucydides. Rather it's about what we talk about when we [sort of] talk about Thucydides.)
When I think about the membership effect, I think about the repeated offhand references to Thucydides that do not really try to engage his work. There's too many to count. I tried once. More kept coming out as I was tracking them down. I felt like Lucy in the candy factory.
I'm talking about passing references, which only assert that the questions and concerns of the modern author are shared with those of Thucydides' text. A gesture to the Athenian Thesis or Melian Dialogue suffices. You see this all the time. Maybe you've done it. I've done it.
And the repetition of this passing gesture is a key part of the Thucydides Function. These repeated invocations of TPW result in a convocation which brings the author together with those who are presupposed to repeat the same gesture.
The invocation evokes a shared community of practice. The discipline that is said to follow from TPWs concerns is effectively called into being at the moment of these ritual invocations. This is the membership effect.
I use the work "invocation" very deliberately here. When we use the verb "invoke" we may talk about citing authoritative figures. But we may also talk about conjuring -- calling for as if by magic.
There are other types of performances, which I describe elsewhere. But what's the performative effect of all these? Basically, the discourse of repeated invocations seem to conjure forth a necessary and apparent relationship between Thucydides and contemporary IR.
These invocations tend to focus on parts of the text where Thucydides' ambiguity is contained, and do not look at too carefully at those. After all, if we were to linger too long, our claims about connections between TPW & modern concerns may start to seem less certain.
Such is the membership effect. When we casually cite TPW, we convoke a shared community of scholars within a discipline that (from past to the present) follows from Thucydides. We make room for our theoretical contributions following from that communal historical claim.
In this way, when we're eavesdropping on honored ghosts like Thucydides, hearing what he's saying has less importance than the fact that we're listening in together. Who are we? We are Thucydides audience, and we have been for some time.
The "we have been for some time" leads to the 2nd part of the Thucydides Function: the continuity effect. By a continuity effect, I mean the tendency to obscure the historicity of modern IR by gesturing towards Thucydides imprimatur.
To the extent to which we can get away with claiming Thucydides as the farther of our theories, we also effect deep historical roots to our theories. This presumption of privilege, borne of age, can obscure the present-day sources of our thought.
To the extent to which we can get away with claiming Thucydides as IR's father, we effect deep historical roots to our theories by implying 2400 years of analytical continuity. This presumption of privilege, borne of age, can obscure the present-day sources of our thought.
And again, this isn't any deep secret. One fascinating and sophisticated attempt to connect Thucydides to modern theory (which does much more, it should be said, than invoke him) begins with the sentence "Movements establish genealogies to legitimate themselves."
(We could instead use Derrida's language here, and say: "Inheritance is never a given; it is always a task.)
An important clarification: I'm not saying that Thucydides is being used as a gatekeeper here. After all, its a curious kind of gate-keeping that would potentially invite in anyone speaking in the register of a theory that would repeat this ritual gesture.
Because this sort of discursive practice has taken place from many different theoretical grounds. Thucydides has been made to be the father of all manners of realism, but also of constructivism and of many other grand to mid-range theories.
Thucydides becomes a shibboleth -- what he may have meant is not as important as our facility to deftly pronounce his name.
All of which is a long way of saying that it's worth considering the possibility that the frequency with which Thucydides is assigned in IR goes hand in hand with the tendency to assign only truncated parts that do the text little justice. That’s the Thucydides function at work.
I’m not sure the Thucydides Function can be avoided, but I do believe it can be resisted. And it seems to me that one powerful way to do that is not to stop reading Thucydides, but instead to actually start reading TPW. All of it.
Which I concede may not be a good fit for intro classes, but nevertheless…
Reading more complicates things. We see that the Athenian thesis, on which the Thucydides trap is based, might not be entirely supported by the text.
Following from that, we might begin to wonder whether it was instead the anti-democratic turn toward oligarchic interests that doomed Athens. Could the decline of democratic discourse be what trapped Athens? A timely question.
Reading on, we see that the Melian Dialogue does not necessarily establish that justice is in the interest of the stronger. Spoiler alert: things end badly for the Athenians, and the further they turn from principles like justice & deliberation, the worse it seems to get.
That's not the usual takeaway point I see when I see the Melian dialogue stropped of context in an intro course.
So far I’ve only talked about discipline in the 1st sense: the academic field. But the Thucydides function also disciplines practitioners by encouraging a certain disposition toward theory, awfully similar to the one my mentor named the “sovereign voice” of IR scholarship.
One way to think of this is to realize that the Thucydides function isn’t for gatekeeping. ANY theory could potentially be included in this ritual of Thucydides citations, if only they are willing to repeat the performance. But it does a sort of prior limiting work.
This is because the membership effect is comes from more than invoking Thucydides. It comes from willingness to speak it his name in a certain register.
That way of speaking his name is one which imposes a narrative structure on global events, fixed by the reasoning theorist who is able to transcend the ambiguity of historical limitations. It's a way of speaking that the Thucydides Function attributes to Thucydides himself.
By attributing this voice to Thucydides, then citing him, IR scholars of all stripes have attempted to reaffirm and reproduce the centrality and continuity of this subject position. The authority we grant him is then reflected back upon ourselves.
This is perhaps why the bit that students are often expected to read, other than the Melian Dialogue, is the pomp and hullabaloo in book 1 about the text being a possession for all time.
Now, I’ve not really even begun to make that second argument here; I’ve only gestured to it. Heck, I've barely sketched out the first. Apologies, I need to get back to the writing that I promised my co-author I’d complete today. But I want to make 2 quick points first:
1) If we’re interested in decentering that sovereign voice, then decentering Thucydides and adopting the non-western historical texts recommended in that FP article is a good start. TPW can be read along with these texts or left behind in favor of them.
2) When we make that switch, we have an opportunity to change how we orient ourselves to historical texts. Making the switch would have the most impact if we are careful not to privilege the least ambiguous elements of the texts while excluding the rest, like we often do with TPW
After all, there is nothing unique about Thucydides role, per se, in the Thucydides Function. We can see in IR in various other guises -- perhaps a Hobbes Function, a Rousseau Function, a Kant Function. It was never about Thucydides; it was about us.
There’s a real opportunity, then, in decentering Thucydides, because these other texts have the advantage of not having been already made IR clichés. There is not yet the Bulwer-Lytton-esque “Ever since the days of Thucydides…” that inures us to what’s being said.
Of course, even with that decentering, the disciplinary posture of the Thucydides Function could surely be recreated, but perhaps it needn’t be quite so powerful?
“Anyway, I’ve written about this sort of stuff in two lovely edited volumes, which would fit wonderfully on your university’s library’s shelves” he said, sort of sheepishly.
They are: “A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides,” and “The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics” all full of lovely, careful work by very good people.
With that, I conclude what is significantly more than I ever expected to say on Twitter about Thucydides.
