Success Quote by Richard Cobden

Cobden’s jab flatters the daily paper while quietly gutting the prestige economy of “serious” history. By staging The Times against Thucydides, he isn’t really comparing facts; he’s comparing social technologies. Thucydides represents a canon built for statesmen and scholars, dense with motive, power, and the long view. The Times stands for the new Victorian information machine: fast, standardized, and, crucially, purchasable by an expanding literate public. Cobden—businessman, free-trade politician, apostle of modern commerce—knows exactly which side he wants to win.

The intent is polemical, not bibliophilic. It’s a defense of practical knowledge: prices, policies, wars, shipping, parliamentary maneuvers—the stuff that moves markets and votes. Calling that “more useful” reframes usefulness as immediate instrumentality, the kind of intelligence that lets you act tomorrow morning. It’s also a swipe at inherited authority. Classical history, in this view, is less a guide to action than a museum of noble lessons that conveniently keep power in the hands of those trained to interpret it.

The subtext is almost prophetic about the modern public sphere. Newspapers don’t just report events; they manufacture a common reality at speed, shaping what counts as urgent and what can be forgotten. Cobden’s line celebrates that acceleration while implying a new hierarchy: credibility comes from circulation, not antiquity. The context matters: mid-19th-century Britain, where reform, industrialization, and empire demanded a constant stream of actionable data. Thucydides may explain the Peloponnesian War; The Times can move the next one.