Thucydides: The Melian Dialogue

The Melian Dialogue, contained in Thucydides’ principal work, The Peloponnesian War, is a classical text for today’s civic education work/an ideal (stimulus) text for use in modern civic education. Juchler opens this chapter by explaining the mutual interdependence of democracy and foreign policy in Athens during the first democracy and then summarizing the content of the Melian Dialogue. Next, he analyzes the doctrine of the right of the stronger, as presented by Thucydides in the Dialogue. In the next stage of his argument, Juchler introduces the concepts of might, interests, and right with special reference to international relations, outlining in this context the respective stances of the realist school of International relations in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes and that of its idealist counterpart going back to Immanuel Kant. The last section of this chapter presents some contending positions on might and right in present-day international relations, focusing on the Iraq war of 2003, the International Criminal Court, and the concepts of might and right in the context of German foreign policy.

Translated from German with permission from Spinger Fachmedien Wiesbaden. Original publication: Juchler, Ingo (2015) Thukydides: Der Melier-Dialog. In: ibid. Narrationen in der politischen Bildung, Springer VS, pp. 45–72.

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1. University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany Ingo Juchler

1. Ingo Juchler

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Juchler, I. (2018). Thucydides: The Melian Dialogue. In: Political Narrations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70755-6_3

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