I feel like this has been a concept for a long time within imperialist studies, but I can't find it. Surely it's a thing. What would you call it?
EDIT: thanks for all the brilliant responses
Lenin correctly identified that "Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism", so it's already part of "capitalist realism" e.g. "the end of history" and "human nature" fatalism that everyone is evil and greedy born with original sin so you can just plunder and rape your way through the world because only god or the market gods can judge you. And if you don't do it, "they" will.
I don't think there's a need to specify it more. If anything it serves to obfuscate the relation between the two.
If there is, I think it's definitely a catalyst behind things like Dark Forest Theory.
That is an excellent point. "Dark Forest Theory" being imperialists unable to imagine anything but imperialism.
I can't really claim sole credit. I was heavily inspired by the excellent essay Fear Of A Capitalist Planet.
Good read. It is easier to imagine the end of the world (space aliens blow us up with the negative space wedgie gun) than it is to imagine the end of capitalism
I think they can imagine non-imperial societies; the argument is more that non-imperial societies will be destroyed by imperial ones, so you either compete as an imperial state or become part of someone else's empire. Same applies to the dark forest theory.
This is different from capitalist realism, which:
- Views AES states as simply another kind of capitalism ("state capitalism")
- Views pre-capitalist economies as, you guessed it, pretty much capitalism (often the markets = capitalism oversimplification, as well as ignoring the communal aspects of societies)
- Predominantly assumes capitalism as an economic system in fiction
You're right, they'd just flatten any state that effectively resists imperialism into another kind of empire, like they'll call the Soviet Union an empire.
"We are not the first who have aspired to rule; the world has ever held that the weaker must be kept down by the stronger. And we think that we are worthy of power; and there was a time when you thought so too; but now, when you mean expediency you talk about justice. Did justice ever deter any one from taking by force whatever he could? Men who engage the natural ambition of empire deserve credit if they are in any degree more careful of justice than they need be. How moderate we are would speedily appear if others took our place"
-Thucydides (emphasis mine)
Some background for anyone who doesn’t know the context here - this is from an imaginary dialogue between the Athenians and the people of Melos, and this isn’t Thucydides himself saying this from his own perspective.
The Melians have been neutrals and do not wish to pay tribute to the Athenians like many of their other island neighbors. The Athenians say fuck you, pay me, or we kill all of you. The Melians try to reason their way out of it, but they cannot offer the Athenians anything other than an appeal to their morality. The Melians refuse to surrender. The Athenians kill all of the men and sell the women and children into slavery. End of Book V.
Earlier (13 years or so), Thucydides has Pericles remind the Athenians that “the empire you hold is a tyranny,” and warns them that it may have been wrong to take it, but it would be dangerous to let it go because obviously there are going to be a lot of people out there who would have a motive to raze Athens. What the Athenians do to Melos (and Scione, and nearly did to Mytilene) is supposed to be what’s going to happen to Athens at the end of the war, and is what the Athenians feared when they finally lost.
Instead (Thucydides doesn’t get this far), Sparta merely demolishes the Long Walls, letting Athens survive as a city - because they needed Athens, however weakened, to remain as a buffer between them and the Thebans, who were in favor of giving Athens the Melian treatment.
That's really cool context, thanks for sharing that. I was totally unaware. I read the part I quoted in an old collection of (i think) Plato's writings I found in a box of my mom's old college books when I was in high-school and that "natural ambition of empire" line has stuck with me for over two decades. Cheers, comrade.
Cheers! I’m glad I didn’t just muddle things. It’s dangerous for me to jump into a Thucydides conversation after midnight.
Thucydides is so fascinating and frustrating. His writing is great, he provides some incredible perspective, but he also invents or embellishes in ways we cannot discern fully. Particularly with Pericles. Don't we have like a half dozen actual documents from Pericles himself, several of which are just his name, much like Shakespeare? Thucydides did know the man though.
Pericles had a great reputation as an orator but he died just before the Athenians started publishing speeches (or paying other dudes to write them). We have some sayings of his in Plutarch's biography, but they're just one-liners ("Aegina is the eyesore of the Piraeus"), so all we have are invented (not to say wholly fictional) representations in Thucydides and Xenophon's Memorabilia.
Rhetoric was all he had at that point. He served Athens as one of its better military minds and got banished for protecting the rural areas instead of pointlessly heading to the walled Athens. Sat out the rest of the 29 year war watching 2 entire generations of young Greeks be slaughtered for nothing. Thucydides is best read as someone wrestling with the collapse of empire and of being able to actively follow tragedy but not fully square that circle as to why they feel so hollow and depressed.
He was exiled after arriving too late to keep Amphipolis from surrendering. Pericles had already (correctly) led the Athenians to abandon the countryside years before.
I know they abandoned the countryside immediately but abandonment was not permanent, the war had large lulls and assaulting troops would go back to friendly cities when it wasn't campaign season , but for some reason I remember A War Like No Other implying Thucydides wasn't able to respond as fast because he was cautious about abandoning his existing region. I checked and I can't find anything like that so oops. However his banishment is certainly an early example of the trend that would destroy Athens' military, the banishment of commanders for being unable to do the impossible. Most significantly Alcibiades
Yes - and the execution of most of the victors of Arginusae.
Re: Alcibiades, one reason he gets more favor in Thucydides's narrative than he otherwise might is because he was probably one of Thucydides's direct sources, what with both of them being in exile in the same region at the same time. Like fired coaches doing play-by-play commentary of their old team inevitably losing without them in the playoffs, only with all of their friends' lives at stake.
I recommended G.E.M. de Ste. Croix in another thread today, but also check out Jacqueline de Romilly if you can find anything of hers at your library. Her book on Thucydides and Athenian imperialism is a great antidote to the Cold War / neo-con American takes on the Peloponnesian War, and her read of Athenian foreign policy as a two-party binary of "pivot toward Persia" versus "pivot toward Sparta," with anti-imperialist voices completely silent, is certainly something that echoes today. It's also the best book for understanding Thucydides's relationship to Pericles (to respond to your other reply above).
Thanks for the recs. I got my start in the subject from Victor Davis Hanson who in hindsight is a fucking maga nut. So I need some less.....um fashy reading on the matter. Much as War Like No Other is well written and he does interestingly frame the Aegean islands as "Greek third world". I got super into this era of Greek history and Hanson unfortunately is the one who sparked my love for reading history that never stopped. Finding out what he really is killed my momentum on the specific subject matter.
I feel your pain. Don’t tell anyone, but Leo Strauss and his crowd were a major influence on the way I’ve approached Greek texts, and when they let their mask slip it’s a serious buzzkill. In his lectures on the Symposium Strauss discusses the atmosphere in Athens after the mutilation of the Herms and says something like “It was a lot worse than McCarthyism, because McCarthy did nothing wrong.”
Hanson has a hilarious essay in which he insists that the Iraq invasion wasn’t going to be the U.S.’s Sicilian Expedition, because it was a reasonable response to September 11.
Donald Kagan was a huge neo-con but was probably the most influential American classicist of recent vintage who made a special study of Thucydides. I don’t know of any reason to distrust his military analysis but on matters of political interpretation I’d default more to Croix, de Romilly, or scholars who prioritized legal and literary texts, like Douglas Macdowell or Nicole Loraux, the latter of whom had wonderful books on amnesty and an account of the funeral oration as a genre. Finally, it’s not composed entirely of winners, but the Brill Companion to Thucydides has some very helpful essays providing both contemporary context as well as Thucydidean exegesis.
Perhaps also of interest - Page duBois’s Trojan Horses: Saving Classics From Conservatives, which discusses Hanson specifically.
fwiw i agree with this, viewing great power competition as the default of inter-state relations is basically the closest to 'imperialist realism' if what 'imperialist realism' means is the assumption that states always do antagonistic/competitive actions to further hegemonic aims, which is more or less what people mean when they say 'imperialism has always been a thing'.
This is why listening to Mersheimer sounds like someone made up stuff on the fly, cherry pick and give the “I told you so” respond when their unrealistic ideas are not adopted
Idk... the post-cold war consensus...? (A riff on the U.K's post-war consensus)
Cuz what I think you refer to, as imperialist realism (there is no alternative but western neo-colonialism), essentially derives from that?
This was a phrase I first saw used by Daniel Bessner.
So what message would the average fourteen-year-old take away from Black Ops Cold War? To riff on a phrase coined by Mark Fisher, the game evinces an “imperialist realism” that can’t quite justify American actions abroad, but also can’t imagine a world outside of a militarily dominant U.S. empire. This idea is clearly expressed in Bell’s trigger phrase (“We’ve got a job to do”), which implicitly affirms that in the Cold War, and perhaps in every war, all a soldier can do is put his or her head down and get to work. Though nothing — not the CIA, not the Soviet Union, not even one’s own mind — can be trusted, no other world is possible, so you might as well support your own empire. https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-cultural-contradictions-of-call-of-duty/
The weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has entered the chat
If you examine our words for countries or areas of land, most of them derive from the idea of monarchy and nobility.
Not just Kingdom and Duchy, but also Region, Realm, Domain, County, Principality, and a few others. Even Province evokes conquest. It seems the main exception is Territory.
