The Historians, the Actors, and Strategic Thinking. A Comment on 'Capodistrias and the German Federation'

Abstract

The paper refers to historical sources and secondary literature to determine the extent to which the basic prerequisites of game theory are valid in view of the complexity of the historical question posed in Kyriazis and Economou's paper "Capodistrias and the German Federation." Against the backdrop of the German federal issues in Post-Napoleonic Europe the authors apply game theoretic principles to the contest between Capodistrias and Metternich. The present paper discusses the identity and the number of players, the consistency of their preferences, the relativity of their perceived alternatives and their common knowledge. The paper concludes that there is a division of labor between historical science and game theory, whereby the latter, based on received historical knowledge, can avoid the hypostatization of the players' preferences, rationality and alternatives and formulate hypotheses about their strategic calculations. Historical scholarship can use these hypotheses as orientation points for the interpretation of historical sources.

Keywords: Capodistrias, Metternich, von Stein, German Confederation, Strategic Thinking, Game Theory