Until recently, my academic field—political theory/history of ideas—had a ‘canon’ that cut out the *entire* first half of the record of human political thought.
This ‘canon’ was arbitrarily drawn from 4 times and places *only*: (1) a single century in the ancient Aegean, almost all from Athens…
I need folks to know "classics are classic for a reason" re: creative work is not the great argument you think it is, mostly because it leaves entirely unexamined the *reasons* some things persist in culture, of which "quality," subjective in any event, is only one reason and often not the main one.
… (2) late republican/early imperial Rome (again, about a century); (3) a handful of societies that developed in the wake of the Western Empire’s collapse (almost all a millennium later, after 1500 CE); and (4) the modern settler colonial societies of North America (not S. America, Oceania, Africa)…
Greek & Roman historian here. Fact check: true. Ancient Mediterranean historians worth our salt don’t just read about Greeks and Romans.
Aug 11, 2025 14:18Thank goodness for that! One thing I really should have mentioned is that much of the excellent work that people in my field have done in recent years to expand our geographic horizons has been heavily dependent on scholarship in other fields that began this work much earlier.
