Thucydides, thinker of the political

Abstract

One of the many disputes surrounding the interpretation of Thucydides' work lies in determining the genre of his writing. In this paper, Thucydides is considered as a political thinker, that is, an author that identifies certain underlying and founding features of a political order, rather than as a historian of an ancient war. The approach developed here identifies four key concepts in the work of the Greek thinker: the notion of immanent and psychological cause (prophasis) as a more effective explanation in the face of mythical or final explanations when it comes to accounting for human events; the consideration of a problematic human nature (anthropeía phýsis) that transcends historical stages; the concealment (apokrýptein) of this nature in moments of normality and its irruption in moments of political crisis; and, finally, the primacy of desire (epithymía) over reason in the dynamics that drives the praxis of human beings. These concepts extracted from Thucydides' text form a theoretical corpus that will be taken up on more than one occasion by other thinkers who need to be able to think about a new political order. Hence, they have a trans-historical character