Thucydides Realism Quotes

In part, British willingness to yield to American demands reflected the belief that both states shared not just an ethnic and linguistic heritage, but also a common political culture and model of governance. But the principal driver was cold realism.36

While he appreciated Herodotus, our professor insisted that Thucydides was the first to focus exclusively on capturing history “as it really happened.”1 His account combines a journalist’s eye for detail, a researcher’s search for truth among competing accounts, and a historian’s ability to identify the root causes behind complex events. Thucydides was also, as Professor Labban taught us, the pioneer of what we now call realpolitik, or realism in international relations.