Thucydides in Eighteenth-Century France: Framing the reception of the classical in Political Thought (original) (raw)

Abstract

In his novel Émile, Rousseau claims that ‘Thucydides is to my taste the first true model of an historian’ because he reports the facts without judging them and he puts all he recounts before the reader's eyes. Rousseau is not alone in this judgement. Pierre-Charles Levesque, a noted historian and translator of Thucydides during the French Revolution, called him ‘the most political historian’ and claimed that there was scarcely a matter put before the British houses of parliament from which some illumination could not be found in the Histories. That Thucydides is a presence in eighteenth-century political thought is beyond doubt. The question that I wish to pose in this paper is the possibilities and limitations of classical reception as a methodology to study this presence and whether classical scholars are the best people to be exploring this material at all (over say intellectual historians or political theorists), using the reception of Thucydides in the eighteenth century as my example. An intellectual historian or a Rousseau scholar might be interested in classical influences insofar as they help us understand key texts and their contexts. But why are classical reception scholars interested in references to ancient material in early modern political texts? The answers to this question are many. It could be because they point to the continuing ‘usefulness’ of the classics, the immense influence of Thucydides in the Western political tradition or because it allows the classical scholar to feel like he/she is working in an interdisciplinary capacity. Few heave yet considered the extent to which these motivations and biases conflict with the aims of intellectual historians and political theorists or the potential that a thorough understanding of a key classical text, such as Thucydides, might have in the comprehension of Rousseau or the Western political tradition in general. In this paper, I hope to frame the value of classical reception in the history of political thought and try to give answers to the questions: How often are classical scholars actually in a position to understand classical allusions with any conviction? What standards does this research need to meet to persuade an intellectual historian or political theorist? Indeed, how often is reception research targeted at these specialists, rather than at fellow classicists? How might this research best be disseminated in other disciplines? This paper will address these urgent questions and make a number of suggestions about how reception studies might contribute to intellectual history.

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