Thucydides and the Politics of Truth

Abstract

Populism, fake news, international rivalry and the plague: for many commentators, contemporary events seem to reflect those described by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. There is already a long tradition of seeing Thucydides as an authority on both the present and the future and the past, understood in a variety of ways: historians emphasize the importance of historical knowledge, while social scientists see him as a pioneer of normative political theory. His work encourages such comparisons and convinces of its "usefulness" - not as a source of abstract principles of human behavior, but as a learning experience, an understanding of the importance of proper knowledge of the world and of the many situations in which human thinking may turn out to be wrong.