ricardienne | Cleon

I had forgotten that David Brooks' (and others') perennial head-shaking about the 'technocrats' their silly exaltation of science/specialization/expertise over common sense and received opinion, was basically the rhetoric of Cleon, the Guy Who First Demonstrated Why Democracies Can't Have Nice Things:

What will be worst of all is if nothing stands fixed which has been decided upon, and we don't recognize that a city is stronger using worse but unshaken laws than ones that are very fine, but unstable, and that ignorance together with prudence is a more useful thing than brilliance together with license, and that lesser men, as compared to more intelligent ones, for the most part are better at civil life. For the latter want to seem to be cleverer than the laws and to excel in public with whatever they are saying. But the former, distrusting in their own intelligence judge that they are less smart than the laws and are less able to criticize the recommendation of a good speaker and being judges from a position of equality rather than competitors they set most things straight. -- Thucydides. 3.57

Or was Cleon all that bad? Democratic politicians don't come off very well in most ancient sources, and Thucydides had particular reason for ira et studium toward the guy who got him exiled. I'm not sure that importing the Tacitus model onto Thucydides (even though I like Tacitus far more than Thucydides, and one would think that treating Thucydides more like Tacitus would make me like him more) is entirely helpful, but it's also good that he (Thucydides) -- slowly over the second half of the 20th century -- has gotten a more critical eye as a historian. (Although I'm not sure how much of this percolated over to Polysci and IR, where I think he is still a gospel authority. Maybe it doesn't matter over there whether he is laying out a theory strongly supported by historical fact or not.) So Cleon, like Tiberius, Nero, and Domitian, gets a bit of a rehabilitation now and then. But this is not perhaps the most scholastically auspicious way to go about it:

Thus have this ill-assorted pair (sc. Aristophanes and Thucydides) gained their revenge: I submit that there is no real reason to suppose anything of the kind. That both wrote literature of survival value, and that both disliked Cleon, ought not to be regarded as more than fortuitous. It clinches no argument. One could suggest comparative instances : for example, two such very different men as Shakespeare and St. Thomas More paint much the same picture of King Richard III ; but that proves nothing as to Richard’s real character, which there is cause to view differently.” [{A.G. Woodhead: “Thucydides' Portrait of Cleon” Mnemosyne, 4th s. 13.4 (1960), pp. 289-31, p. 293]

One might note that Daughter of Time was published in 1951.