Reflections on Political Theory: A Voice of Reason from the Past

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Reflections on Political Theory A Voice of Reason from the Past

Neal Wood

Reflections on Political Theory

Also by Neal Wood ANCIENT GREEK POLITICAL THEORY AND CLASS IDEOLOGY: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Social Context (author with Ellen Meiksins Wood) A TRUMPET OF SEDITION: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688 (author with Ellen Meiksins Wood) CICERO’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT COMMUNISM AND BRITISH INTELLECTUALS JOHN LOCKE AND AGRARIAN CAPITALISM NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI: THE ART OF WAR (editor) THE FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society THE POLITICS OF LOCKE’S PHILOSOPHY: A Social Study of ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’

Reflections on Political Theory A Voice of Reason from the Past Neal Wood Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Senior Scholar York University Toronto Canada

© Neal Wood 2002 All right reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provision of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–96880–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, Neal. Reflections on political theory : a voice of reason from the past / Neal Wood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-333-96880-8 (cloth) 1. Political science – History. 2. Political science – Philosophy. I. Title. JA81 . W66 2001 320⬘.01 – dc21 2001053170 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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To the Late Lloyd H. Fisher and to Norman Jacobson

Contents Preface

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1 Questions and Problems

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Part I Defining Political Theory

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2 State and Politics 2.1 Nature of the state 2.2 Meaning of politics 2.3 Symbolic forms and politics

17 17 25 32

3 Character of Political Theory 3.1 Political theorist as ‘a reformer of politicks’ 3.2 The generative dimension 3.3 The prescriptive dimension 3.4 The persuasive dimension

39 41 47 56 61

4 Conditions Favouring Political Theory 4.1 Political conflict and social turmoil 4.2 Freedom of expression 4.3 Intellectual quality and education 4.4 Optimism about the future

71 73 76 78 84

Part II Studying Political Theory

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5 Philosophical Mode of Analysis 5.1 The ivory tower syndrome 5.2 The philosophical idealism of the Cambridge School 5.3 Philosophy without history or philosophy and history?

91 92 101

6 Historical Mode of Analysis 6.1 Ideational and material realms

115 117

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6.2 Questions of historicism and relativism 6.3 Role of ideology

122 126

7 Marxism and the Historical Mode of Analysis 7.1 Salience of the economic 7.2 History as dynamic process 7.3 Class structure and conflict 7.4 Conception of the state

133 135 138 146 151

8 Afterword: Toward the Future

155

Notes

165

Index

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Preface This book is dedicated to two of my teachers and friends at Berkeley. Lloyd Fisher unfortunately died in 1953, but Norman Jacobson is still thriving. Both were brilliant mentors of impressive intellect whose stimulus, example, and patience launched me on my course. My gratitude to them is inexpressible; although they would probably disagree with much of what I have to say. About a sixth of the book has been pilfered from my previously published writings, with some stylistic and substantive adjustments. Notes have been kept to an absolute minimum. The compendiumlike quality of the book in places is deliberate in order to convey something of the virtuosity of the great political theorists and the historical sweep of their lives and thought. No detailed analysis of any specific thinker (with the possible exception of Marx) is included, a task which I have ventured for good or worse elsewhere in regard to some of them. My project here is only to suggest in preliminary fashion the essence of political theory. For the unrewarding and time-consuming effort in reading and commenting on several drafts, I wish to thank friends and associates and to absolve them of any responsibility for the final outcome. In the midst of numerous other labours, Ellen Meiksins Wood was able to assess critically several drafts, to make penetrating suggestions for revision, and to offer invaluable support throughout the writing. I also deeply appreciate the help of others who gave me the benefit of their advice and insight, and saved me from numerous errors and omissions: George Comninel, Louis Lefeber, and David McNally of York University; Cary J. Nederman of Texas A and M University, and Gordon J. Schochet of Rutgers University. The anonymous readers for Palgrave also made some useful suggestions. Marie-Anne Lee of Glendon College typed various versions in her usual efficient, painstaking, and cheerful manner, and Edward Telesford of London completed a final draft with aplomb in his usual skilful manner.

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Finally, I am obligated more than they will ever know to my undergraduate and graduate students over the years at Columbia, UCLA, Berkeley, and York, discussing and improving many of the ideas in this volume. NEAL WOOD London

1 Questions and Problems

This is an unashamedly ‘old-fashioned’ book. I am here self-consciously distancing myself from current intellectual fashions, in the belief that the essential issues of social and political theory have been obscured in recent academic debates, beyond all normal comprehension. This may be a good moment to strip things down to common sense simplicity, even deliberate naiveté, since the questions – let alone the answers – are threatening to become invisible. My argument is old-fashioned in three broad substantive ways: it emphasizes the crucial importance of the state; it stresses the social and material contexts of ideas, at a time when ‘historical’ contexts are identified with ‘discourse’, not only by poststructuralist or postmodernist currents but by more conventional historians of political thought; and it insists not only on the utility of political theory but on its critical and subversive power, at a time when ‘politics’ itself is out of fashion and when the history of political theory is typically treated as a story of disembodied ‘discourses’ or repudiated altogether as an oppressive ‘canon’. My argument certainly departs from some major ‘postmodern’ assumptions and values: their particularism and localism, their opposition to universals, ‘totalizing’ knowledge and ‘grand narratives’, their linguistic reductionism, their insistence on the fragmented and ‘decentred’ subject, their repudiation of collective agency and any general project of human emancipation. Apart from the substantive emphases, my style of thinking will possibly appear old-fashioned and unfashionable because it is directed to renewing the Enlightenment project in a single intellectual sphere in opposition to what is taken to be the obscurantism and nihilism of a 1

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world increasingly subject to a failure of nerve in confronting recent catastrophic events. I might be labelled a philosophical realist and ‘empiricist’ who endeavours to apply common sense to the assessment of social and political phenomena. If asked to justify my position, I would reply pragmatically: see what happens if you jump off the top of a ten-storey building on to the street below or drive at reckless speed the wrong way on a one way street. Or more poignantly consider: the survivors of the holocaust, the people of Bosnia and Kosovo, the homeless begging on every street corner, the bulging bellies of the African victims of starvation. My empiricism rejects the mind as a passive register of sense impressions, involving instead an active intellect and creative imagination.1 I strive to inject common sense in a forthright, tentative, and down-to-earth way into issues that seem in recent debates to have been distorted and confused. Before leaving the confessional, I should say that because political theory can only be treated seriously from the perspective of a self-consciously held conception of history, my own, which is the leitmotif of the book, will be clear after reading this chapter. Let us turn to the subject in hand. At one time or another many of us have probably read several of the great works of political theory: Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s Prince, More’s Utopia, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, and Mill’s On Liberty. Fewer may be familiar with Aristotle’s Politics, Cicero’s De re publica, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The informed reader, however, once the authors and titles are enumerated, will have a general notion of the meaning of political theory, without necessarily having studied it systematically. But the precise characterization of such a body of literature, beyond the obvious focus upon state, government, and politics, may prove to be more problematic. What do the relevant works of thinkers as remote from each other in time and culture as Aristotle and Burke, or Cicero and Bodin have in common? What were they attempting to do? What did they mean by state and politics in comparison to what we mean? Do their works exhibit similar traits? Among past political thinkers are some of the supreme literary stylists of our culture – Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, More, Hobbes, Rousseau, Burke – and many of the others are not without literary merit. Aside from such virtuosity and the common topic of their speculations, how can their intellectual endeavours best be defined

Questions and Problems 3

and compared? When, where, and why did political theory first appear? What kinds of questions did political theorists ask, and what are their answers, and if there are differences in questions and answers, what is the explanation? What did political theorists hope to accomplish by their writings? To whom did they address their thoughts? What were the circumstances of their theorizing, and how did the circumstances affect their ideas? How was their thought related to the societies in which they lived and to the ideas they inherited? These are a few of the broad queries and problems to which answers will be sought in my synopsis of political theory. In our time, at the outset of a new millennium, an age bedevilled by the most complex difficulties demanding enlightened guidance and urgent action, the crucial question for the public has to do with the immediate practical relevance of these past thinkers. Why should we bother with the political ideas of individuals as far distant as Protagoras or Polybius, or even of the nineteenth century like Hegel, Tocqueville, Bentham, Mill, and Green? Now that socialism has all but disappeared from the world scene, why should we turn to Marx and Engels? How can the study of political theory possibly have any bearing upon our own urgent troubles? Is it not an ill-afforded luxury, fiddling while Rome is burning? Much knowledge and learning, so carefully cultivated in universities, is often dismissed as sheer antiquarianism, of no practical relevance for our pressing problems. If we are to be concerned with political theory why not find inspiration and direction in thinkers of the past century who have shared our own experience with a host of crucial matters, among them: two global wars, totalitarianism, the holocaust, death camps, genocide, nuclear annihilation, terrorism, nationalism, racism, famine, disease, and impoverishment, the destruction of the natural environment, the universal influence of the mass media, the proliferation of transnational corporations, globalization, economic crisis and depression, the accelerating rate of criminal activity and drug addiction, the disintegration of the family, and the growth of religious fundamentalism? Posed thus, these reflections immediately raise the question of the ‘canon’, which has become so controversial in recent years. Why select a few ‘classic’ works or ‘great books’ for study in university courses as the accepted mode of analysing and understanding our culture? How can we possibly illuminate or do justice to our heritage

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by reference to canonical texts written by ‘Dead White Males’, or come to grips with other cultures by focusing upon Western Europeans. In doing so, are we not guilty of distorting the past by ignoring the life experience of most of the world’s population: the male domination of women, the oppression of racial and national minorities, the endemic violence in social relations? By overlooking numerous so-called minor authors and works and confining ourselves to Western European writers are we not radically skewing the picture? In partial reply to these important doubts, the canonical texts of political theory mentioned throughout this book focus upon the Western state; and since classical antiquity, the Western state has been marked by a systemic inequality and domination of the many by a few. These texts reflect and comment upon the nature of the Western state with all its blemishes and deficiencies as well as benefits. Some of the texts call for radical reorganization of the state, others for its reform, and in so doing grapple with fundamental social and political problems which we share with the past. Whether we like it or not, these works have indelibly stamped our modern culture and the World today. They have been assiduously studied by statesmen, politicians, and the educated classes throughout Western history, exerting a profound influence upon their thought and action, and perception of reality. J. M. Keynes’ hyperbole certainly contains a kernel of truth: ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.’2 The influence of the texts has not been solely due to literary merit, but more especially to their intellectual acuity, and highly persuasive argumentation, not to mention their articulation of the ruling ideas of a period, those of the ruling classes, or, more rarely the main challenges to those ideas. The classic texts reflect powerful minds at work. Their concerns may not be a high priority for some of us today, compared to gender and race, for example, but given the character of the societies in which the books were written, the defects and omissions by no means render them valueless for understanding their times, nor useless in scrutinizing our own and looking to the future. For this latter project, the texts with all their limitations represent a voice of reason from the past not to be summarily dismissed or neglected.


In view of the kinds of questions so far raised, I have made the terminus of my study the end of the nineteenth century because historical detachment and perspective are lacking for specifying the classic political thinkers of our disturbing epoch. Who knows whether at the end of the twenty-first century esteemed thinkers of our age will still be remembered, much less read, except as curiosities? Intellectual vogues are now changing more than ever before so that writers highly regarded at one time or another during the past century are by its end all but forgotten, consigned to the dustbin of history, to be replaced by new luminaries many of whom no doubt will suffer the same fate as their immediate predecessors. And thus the wheel of intellectual fashion grinds on in its ineluctable and ever quickening motion. Since it would be exceedingly rash to nominate for greatness and immortality a handful from a long list that might be compiled, common sense compels me to make my enquiry historical by ending it at the beginning of the last century.3 But more of the problem of relevance later. The greatest obstacle today to the study of political theory appears to be a growing antipathy to history and a declining interest in the past. Not many people really care what professional historians within the cloisters of academe do in their detailed analyses of countries, periods, institutions, and persons. But within academe it is a different story for historians of political theory. They occupy an ill-defined interdisciplinary area of scholarly enquiry overlapping history, philosophy, political science, economics, and sociology. They are neither fish nor fowl, amateurs to professional historians and philosophers, quaint from the point of view of some social scientists. What possible benefit can stem, or so the charge is sometimes made, from the historical study of complex concepts like justice, freedom, equality, power, authority, obligation, rights, duties, democracy, representation, and consent? Only if liberated from the heavy hand of the past, it is often implied, just as has happened in the natural sciences, will such rational conceptual analysis be of any relevance to our imperative need for social and political action. It is not uncommon to complain about the loss of historical memory associated with our age of rapid change, but we need to understand the specific historical roots of that forgetfulness. Historical amnesia is in a sense the essential condition of capitalism. ‘Creative destruction’, to borrow Joseph Schumpeter’s apt expression,

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is the operative norm of the capitalist economy, with requires ever advancing technology, the constant drive to overturn established arrangements and to revolutionize the forces of production, so as to maintain and increase competitiveness and profitability. This drive is specific to capitalism and appeared very late in human history, in very specific historical conditions, however much we have come to believe that the ‘free market’ is a ‘natural’, and ideally universal, mode of activity.4 Since capitalism has emerged triumphant from the Cold War, and since ‘globalization’ has intensified the pressures of capitalist competition, Marx’s characterization of the capitalist system, in the Communist Manifesto, is now more true than ever before: ‘Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois era from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations … are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air …’. We can also, no doubt, blame the mass media for accelerating the progress of historical amnesia and ‘dumbing down’ mass culture. But they have also alerted us to the latest social trends. Among them, feminism, particularly of the radical sort, despite its indisputable contribution to the betterment of our lives and promise for the future, has had a hand in the demise of history. For some feminists, history should be written off as the horribly tragic tale of male domination, of countless variations on the single theme of patriarchal absolutism. From this quite understandable standpoint, it would be best to begin afresh and recreate society through a ‘politics of difference’. But these feminists are not alone in their stigmatizing the past and call for renewal. They are joined by spokesmen of racial minorities, blacks for instance, who view the Western past largely in terms of white oppression. The antipathy to the history taught in our schools and universities is shared by blacks with others of non-Europeans origins. For all of them the charge against history is its ethno-centrism. Our history is Western history which offers a Western and consequently truncated and distorted account of the rich heritage of non-Western peoples and cultures. Far less justifiable is the alarming trend among various Western national groups to promote their own narrow chauvinistic claims to territory and autonomy by the erasure of the evidential record through the rewriting of history, a charge that cannot be made against feminists or anti-racists.


Unlike these developments, some postmodernists actively dissuade us from the study of any kind of history. With their rejection of the Enlightenment project, denial of universals, relativism of values, radical particularism and subjectivism, the past is seen as little more than a text through which one’s unique individuality can be realized. There is no author, just a text to be interpreted as one sees fit. Little is left of history after the postmodernist celebration of contingency, the condemnation of grand narrative, and the onslaught against truth value. The message seems to be to carve out one’s own individualistic niche in the present with slight hope for the future. Even current historical scholarship is apparently infected by elements of the postmodernist outlook, for instance, in the work of the ‘revisionist’ historians of seventeenth-century England with their particularistic focus upon events and institutions isolated from and unrelated to the historical process welding the present with past and future. While dedicated historical materialists certainly do not partake of the new nihilism of postmodernism, some of them, in a quandary of where to turn now that socialism seems to have been mortally wounded by a triumphal capitalism, appear to have become less historical and even less materialistic in outlook. This seems to be shortsighted, given the illuminating historical consciousness of Marx, Engels, and Gramsci, and at the time when a few superb Marxist historians (Ste Croix, Hilton, Hill, Rudé, Thompson, Saville, Hobsbawm) are leaving such a treasury of scholarly enquiry. Yet some historical materialists along with many of the pacemakers of the latest intellectual fashions – not to mention the general public – apparently confuse history with the stale enumeration of chronological facts, relegating it when necessary to background for more important contemporary analyses. For them the study of history before the French Revolution, or more often than not a century later, the First World War, is little more than self-indulgent antiquarianism, a matter of intellectual curiosity for those who can afford the luxury of ignoring both present and future. Since we are living through a perpetual time of trouble, of permanent economic, social, and political crisis, brought home to us by the mass media, what, we are asked, is the possible relevance, the immediate practical import of the study of the distant past. Is it no more than a form of intellectual impotence that we can ill-afford?

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The cry of ‘relevance’ is heard on all sides. Yet those who so cry may suffer from some sort of self-delusion. How relevant is relevance? What is meant by relevance, and to whom is something relevant and for what reasons? How are degrees of relevance to be calculated, and what is the basis for comparing and ranking instances of relevance, and irrelevance? Which is more relevant to our immediate situation: a Platonic dialogue, a Bach fugue, a Matisse painting, a Blake poem, or on the other hand a policy assessment of the situation in Kosovo? What is relevant for one year or decade appears in hindsight to be virtually irrelevant. When one reads the innumerable papers, essays, and books written in the past century in anxious response to immediate practical concerns, one is astonished by how outdated and outmoded many of them now are. How relevant were they then and how relevant are they now or will they be in the future? Is to be relevant simply to be the creature of the moment, to be discarded when that moment has passed? The relevant is frequently little more than the fashionable, here today, and gone tomorrow. Often the call for relevance seems to cloak our own helplessness and feelings of guilt, and is of little import except as a kind of indulgent therapy. There is undoubted merit in seeking guidance out of our practical difficulties, and the resolution of our gravest problems, but whether it is in the form of the most obvious, or the less obvious should be a matter of serious reflection, perhaps some combination of the two. In the meantime, we should be exceedingly cautious about jettisoning the less obvious for the more obvious, and pay more attention to the relevance of the less obvious, for example the study of history. With such a formidable array of anti-historical forces and attitudes imprinting our culture, and no slackening of pressure in sight, there is good reason for making as persuasive a case as possible for the significance of historical studies, and by association, political theory. Since my aim is not primarily to defend history, to do so only tangentially and by way of introduction, I shall express my thoughts on the subject with dispatch, leaving a more extensive brief to be made by the better qualified. One justification for history, which must be touched upon initially, is an appeal to recapturing and preserving the past in order to show how we participate in the rich heritage bequeathed by our forebears and how to continue, modify, and advance it. This is fundamentally an aesthetic attitude to history, a view of the past as majestic and


sublime spectacle that we have inherited and to which we can make a harmonious and reverential contribution. Usually the notion has been associated with the social conservatism of Richard Hooker and Edmund Burke, rooted in Cicero who oracularly pronounced: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’5 Despite the ideological bent of the position, with its unquestioning faith in custom and tradition, and opposition to basic social reform, it possesses elements which should not be slighted, in the suggestion, for example, that we are neither isolated nor alone in our confrontation with the human condition. We act not without precedent in an empty void, for we are blessed with a rich legacy to which we can turn for solace and guidance in our lives. History, from this perspective, is a source of wisdom to be cherished, partaken in, and extended. Not unrelated to this purview, but without its specific ideological baggage and mystical veneration of the past, is the one to be adopted here, which has the merit of being directed toward some of the most recent criticisms of historical studies. The basic tenet is that human beings – whatever else they may be – are essentially historical creatures. We are not born into an Eden, naked and alone in a state of innocence, but into an historically moulded social environment, a way of life – customs, beliefs, values, institutions, laws, social and political arrangements – shaped by the past and to an important extent determining our outlook and actions in present and future. We are in a sense inscribed by our social environment and in turn imprint it, and consequently are not only the bearers of the past, but also the makers of history. What so many take for granted as the ‘natural’ way of life and behaviour is actually the cumulative artefact devised over the ages by the arduous collective labour of countless people, themselves the creations and creators of history, acting and reacting in building their social edifices, eventually giving rise to our own. So to know ourselves and our capabilities, it is vital to know what preceded us. History, then, is an indispensable primary source of self-knowledge and knowledge about the species. In studying history in order to understand ourselves and our species, we bring to the investigation the values and attitudes of our age, reflect upon them (contrasted to those of the past), change them, discard them, and acquire new ones. A sensitive and reflective scrutiny of the past thus

10 Reflections on Political Theory

helps in fashioning ourselves and our future. The study of history is a causeway of self-knowledge and understanding leading to selfrecognition and self-realization, and thereby linking present with future. An acute awareness of the events and arrangements of the past provides a means of comparison with what occurs in the present, enabling us to get our bearings and act appropriately. Again the past helps to span the gap between present and future. If, for example, we wish to grasp the nature of contemporary democratic institutions with the intention of reforming them, what better way to begin than with fifth-century BC Athens plotting the course of the development of both the institution and conception of democracy in the West in the subsequent two and a half millennia? Or if we wish to understand authoritarianism in our world, and to take measures in respect to it, we might be advised to consider its various historical permutations – tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, despotism, absolutism, totalitarianism – and the conditions under which it has thrived. In comparing ourselves and way of life with what has previously occurred we should be keenly conscious of the differences between past and present. While obviously it is worth stressing the similarities of humans and their culture in every age, unless there is an appreciation of the immense differences as well, we will fail to take the full measure of ourselves. The crucial problem is the explanation of changes in beliefs, institutions, and ways of life. The study of history consequently performs roughly the same function for the past that social anthropology has for the present. In the enterprise of historical comparison, focusing on the differences of peoples and cultures, reflecting upon and altering our own values and attitudes, we form a critical judgement about our own world. We are more prone to question our own activities, more sceptical and questioning of our arrangements, more desirous of change and reform. History, thus conceived, is an ever-present threat to the status quo, a gadfly on the flanks of the establishment. If critical self-reflection is one of the marks of the good citizen, then the study of history is an incomparable school of citizenship. These considerations lead to the all-important question of historical change. Only if some clear understanding of change in history is acquired can we act intelligently in reference to the future. History is not a series of static, self-contained, discrete activities and episodes in


chronological sequence. They, on the contrary, are mutually interrelated, some more than others, joined together in a dynamic, developmental process. At the most fundamental level, crucial structural transformations take place, for instance in economic production and the relations of production. Changes in the basic material conditions of a people, seldom happening suddenly but usually over many years or several centuries, may have far-reaching effects on apparently unrelated aspects of their lives. The historian must probe the nature of the changes in the infrastructure and those occurring in apparently peripheral spheres of activities. In attempting to understand the ever-changing historical terrain, we are able to ascertain, in part at any rate, why we are as we are, and what may be done to shape the future. None of this assumes a teleological view of history: the idea that the past is the unfolding of events toward a single, predetermined end or goal. When, however, some insight into the developmental ‘logic’ of the past is gained, we will be in a more favourable position to understand and change ourselves, and to determine the future. Related to the question of change is the relationship of ideas to their social context, a subject of particular relevance to the study of political theory. Are ideas expressed in various forms of discourse, the prime determinants of events, actions, and institutions, or is the reverse true, or is there a reciprocal connection? Are politics and other kinds of social action solely verbal discourse, the playing out of language games? How do ideas change the social environment and how does it in turn affect and modify ideas? On this score it must be emphasized that ideas do not spring fully fabricated out of some kind of social vacuum. Ideas emerge out of the life of human beings living and labouring together in harmony, cooperation, competition, and conflict, in the effort to construct and maintain or modify their social artefact. The world of ideas and the world of practice interpenetrate forming a single social universe. Ideas are an integral component of the social totality. To give priority to ideas over practice, or practice over ideas, is to fracture the social universe. Yet for heuristic reasons ideas must be separated from the non-ideational elements of the social artefact to show how they can be social forces helping to fashion and change practical activity and behaviour. By the same token it must be shown how the non-ideational realm impinges upon and gives birth to and shapes ideas. A study of history enables us to identify the nature of the


relationship between ideas and practice. In so far as we are successful, we can better appreciate the nexus between ideas and practice in our own society, and act accordingly with an eye to the future. The study of history also helps us to perceive its relationship to theory. An appraisal of the relationship of history and theory, with the question in mind of the contemporary practical significance of the former, must begin by recognizing that humans are essentially historical creatures. Far from occupying separate domains, history and theory are joined in a mutually sustaining activity. If history is vital to theory, theory is necessary for the examination of the historical record. This, of course, assumes that history is not mere chronology, but consists of sets of human relationships evaluated through the primary evidence – state papers, chronicles, memoirs, diaries, journals, letters, business records, minutes, broadsheets, newspapers, treatises, pictures, buildings, artefacts – illuminated by our own questions, hypotheses, and theories, which may have to be revised or discarded in terms of what the evidence will bear. We perceive the past from the vantage of our own times, and because the values and concerns of our generation differ from previous and future ones, history is periodically rewritten in light of changing questions, hypotheses, and theories. Instead of relativizing history, this renders it into a living, creative study, which forwards the probing of our own consciousness and realm of values, as well as elucidating the past. Historical studies, therefore, constitute a fruitful investigation of the past, if they are informed by enlightened theory, not inflexible dogma. The theory may have to be altered, amplified, or even dispensed with in the course of the analysis. Theory without history is sheer obfuscation telling us more about the theorist than about social reality, and history without theory ends in intellectual myosis. Enough has been said, I think, to indicate in an impressionistic way that the study of history and political theory may not be a scholastic exercise of scant value as a guide in our present practical concerns. Much will depend upon our will and determination, our refusal to become slaves of fashion and received opinion, and to close our minds and banish from our culture a most fruitful intellectual mode of access to remembrance of things past and to self-understanding. Just at a time, moreover, when it is absolutely crucial to probe our own state of being, it would be rash indeed to deprive ourselves of an invaluable crucible for generating critical judgement.


When ‘citizenship’ has become a favourite slogan of some contemporary political commentators, it would be tragic to demote history to the lowest of our intellectual priorities, for along with literature, art, and philosophy, it encourages and nourishes critical self-understanding and the penetrating examination of our social life. Each citizen a Socratic gadfly is obviously an unattainable ideal, but history is an inestimable instrument for its realization. The intellectual horizon for political theory is not, however, one of unrelieved gloom. During the last forty years, its study, increasing in vigour and sophistication, has experienced something of a renaissance in the English-speaking world, although its work has failed to permeate and influence popular culture. Books, monographs, and articles devoted to aspects of the subject as well as several specialized journals and numerous scholarly conferences have yielded many riches. It might be argued that these developments are little more than the substitute of academic pedants for their lack of original theorizing. No Aristotle or Rousseau of the twentieth or twenty-first century has yet appeared. But regrets over such a failure, as previously suggested, may be premature. Only time will tell whether a work or a thinker will survive as a classic. The recent interest in the study of political theory, furthermore, may not solely be a resort to antiquarianism in a time of disappearing intellectual inventiveness and creativity. Instead, it may be a profound collective act of rediscovering ourselves, recreating ourselves, an important instrument of reorientation, of searching for new bearings in a turbulent sea of troubles, of reliving the past with sympathy and sensitivity for direction in both present and future. Perhaps we should not lament so much the lack of another Plato or Hobbes because the study of political theory itself may in a small way comprise a novel mode of theorizing, of formulating new hypotheses about society, government, and politics from the examination of the past and applying those insights to the present, thus helping to forge the future. This volume, therefore, will attempt to delineate the unique intellectual genre of political theory, to suggest directly or indirectly possible answers to some of the questions previously raised and resolutions to a few of the problems noted. To begin with, the central subject of political theory, the state, and activity related to it – politics and the political – will be explored. Once the meanings of state and politics have been clarified, some of the features common


to political theories will be explained, their shared structure, style, and approach, as well as their differences. Next some attempt will be made to assay the historical conditions most conducive to the development of creative political theorizing in the classic mould, using the Roman Empire, when theory virtually disappeared, as counterexample and warning. If the first half of the book tries to define the nature of political theory, the second is concerned with how it can be studied. Two different modes or ideal types of analysing political theory – the philosophical and the historical – will be discussed, together with several of the problems raised by them. Some attention will then be given to Marxism and political theory. In spite of the recent growing disillusion with Marxism, I shall suggest that it can be one of the most rewarding means of understanding political theory. By way of conclusion, a plea will be made for the importance of political theory, its intellectual and practical significance for our journey into the future.

Part I Defining Political Theory

2 State and Politics

In comparison to the emergence of the first humans over a million years ago, the state is of exceedingly recent origin, arising only in the last fraction of that tremendous time-span, first identifiable over fivethousand years ago. While politics can be construed very broadly its meaning, as we shall see, will be confined to activity related to the state. Political theory, whose primary focus is the state (and politics), is of much more recent vintage, less than one-third the age of the state. The first or primary states, which long ago ceased to exist, appeared sometime before 3,000 BC in Mesopotamia, followed closely in Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Northern China.1 Secondary states initially came into being in response to, under the influence of, or out of the primary states. Society before primary state formation was probably non-stratified and egalitarian; organized on the basis of kinship, communal property, and the village; and characterized economically by food gathering, cultivation, hunting, and household production. The primary states were apparently instituted in late neolithic conditions of rapid population growth, intensification of agricultural production, and increasing social conflict. Changes in agricultural production were a lengthy, gradual process, as was population increase, and urbanization probably began after primary state formation and the beginnings of civilization.

2.1 Nature of the state How is ‘state’ to be defined and described?2 For several decades after the Second World War, the concept of state was generally discredited 17

18 Defining Political Theory

and dismissed by political scientists, many of whom preferred the term ‘political system’. From their viewpoint ‘state’ was far too legalistic and institutional. It might be a serviceable term for the modern nation-state, but inappropriate as a useful category designed to encompass a vast range of diverse political phenomena such as oriental despotisms, medieval kingdoms, and Renaissance city-states. ‘State’, according to the criticisms, simply obscures the nature of the political dynamics of such social groupings, concentrating on formal arrangements. Nevertheless, ‘state’ continues to be employed in common parlance, and recently there has been a widespread renewal of interest in the concept, and increasing acceptance of its usage. ‘State’ can be understood broadly and narrowly. In the broad sense ‘state’ designates a variety of institutional forms from tribal kingdoms and poleis to the modern nation-state. When utilized in this manner, ‘state’, as Morton Fried proposes, is ‘the complex of institutions by means of which the power of the society is organized on a basis superior to kinship’, marked by its claim ‘to paramountcy in the application of naked force to social problems’ through ‘formal, specialized instruments of coercion …’.3 Thus interpreted, all kinds of historical state, along with many differences, exhibit similar basic features. Each is a hierarchical structure of power, one of domination and subordination, over a defined membership and normally a specified territory, with a set of recognized rules, written or unwritten, some sort of centralized administrative apparatus, an armed force for internal and external security, a system for the appropriation and redistribution of surplus labour, for example, by taxation or tribute, and a means of resolving disputes. Any historical state so conceptualized, whether Greek polis or nation-state, can be analysed in different ways: legal and institutional, political, sociological, and economic. Thus political economy has recently been revived to explore the economic dimension of the state: and both Marxists, and liberals such as Franz Oppenheimer, have emphasized the sociological character of the state. In a narrow sense, ‘state’ can be used to denote the object of the early modern conception appearing between 1200 and 1600 (or later states including the twenty-first century nation-state), beginning to be reflected in the latter part of the period in Italy, France, Germany, and England by words like stato, état, republique, Staat, ‘state’, ‘commonwealth’, ‘civil society’, and ‘political society’. The early modern

State and Politics 19

conception of the state fashioned by some of the most notable contributors – Machiavelli, Bodin, Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke – focuses upon constitutional, legal, and institutional aspects. The state is given an abstract institutional being apart from the people it includes. It is conceived of as a distinct constitutional and legal order, central to which is the principle of sovereignty, a locus of perpetual, supreme, and absolute lawmaking power, grounded in the exercise of coercive sanctions. Endowed with a corporative personality, the state is thought of as acting through its officials like an individual in buying, selling, loaning, borrowing, contracting, and so on. The main goal of the state eventually came to be viewed as the purely secular and amoral guardianship of the lives and possessions of its citizens, the maintenance of law and order, and defence against external threats. The state is differentiated from government whose officials act in the name and authority of the state. States are eternal, as it were, while governments come and go, their personnel changing over the years. The state comes to be distinguished from the people or citizens under its law, from society. In constitutionalist versions of the conception, the state in the last analysis is the creature of, and responsible to, the full members of society, however defined. Important elements of the early modern conception, therefore, are its legal, institutional, and secular nature, and the separation of state from both government and society. Some of the critical problems raised by the foregoing remarks on the nature of the state merit further attention. Most of us, of course, recognize the numerous positive benefits conferred by the modern state: the provision of external and internal protection and security, the many economic, social, and cultural functions that have enhanced our lives. Yet we should never forget that the historical state since its inception has been characterized by domination, interest, inequality, violence, fear, and ideology. The history of the state, its very essence, has been paradoxical, both positive and negative. Whether it could have served in the one way without the other is open to question. These bleaker aspects of the state’s nature should not be neglected or dismissed. To an important extent, throughout history, the state, despite its obvious contributions to human wellbeing, has always been a system of domination. By means of the agency of government the state exerts domination over subjects not simply for the sake of domination, but for the advancement of its


own material interests. The state exists to promote and secure the interests of the dominators, the power holders. In addition to their own economic welfare, the power-holders naturally wish to protect and perpetuate their privileged positions vis-à-vis their own subjects and foreign adversaries. If domination, then, is a hallmark of the state, interest is a second major trait. The interests of state and government are forwarded by the imposition of institutionalized political, social, and economic inequalities. The state is an organization of such inequalities for the support of its own interests. The internal domination exercised by state and government entails an inegalitarian social division of dominators and subordinates, of superiors and inferiors in a hierarchical structure of power. Throughout its relatively brief history, the state has rested on the fundamental distinction between a small, leisured, non-labouring minority of dominators and an immense labouring majority of subordinates. The former supplies the brainpower and leadership of the state; the latter, the man and woman power for the production of life’s necessities and state security. The divisions, integral to the state and perpetuated by it, are: between rulers and ruled, rich and poor, surplus appropriators and direct producers, landlords and peasants, capitalists and workers. Such distinctions seem just as pronounced today as before, if not more so, since the state has been universalized to include most of the global population, much of it subjected to authoritarian regimes. Other less obvious social inequalities have until recently flawed the historical state. What of women since the beginnings of the state, women who have shared and suffered the onerous burdens of men, and who have been absolutely indispensable bulwarks of men as wives, mothers, companions, and above all as workers? Until the last century they have received from government little recognition or recompense for their absolutely vital role in the state. Women have always been treated as an underclass; inferior, but necessary, and until now have largely remained ciphers in the historical record. They represent a further social category cutting across the two fundamental divisions (dominators and subordinates) of the historical state and compounding its essential inequality. What of the countless others, besides peasants and workers, the numerous women, men, and children, subjected and degraded – servants, slaves, and serfs – by governments acting in the name of the state, not to mention the


many discriminatory practices against subjects of all ages and both sexes belonging to racial, religious, and national minority groups? By its very nature, consequently, a state, at least in the form we have experienced, with a genuinely egalitarian condition among its citizens and subjects would seem to be a contradiction in terms. The very word ‘state’, derived from the Latin status – standing, position, rank, and order – suggests the inherent inequality of the state. Wherever the state has existed, or can be imagined, for example in Plato’s Kallipolis or More’s Utopia, we find the inequality of domination and subordination. Indeed, state and politics are two sides of the same coin of domination, interest, and inequality. The state is the organization and institutionalization of the social division between rulers and ruled, and all it implies for human relations. Politics is the activity of maintaining, strengthening, or altering the division through coercion, compromise, balancing inconveniences, the selection of various ways and means, and the management of people. So far I have emphasized the built-in or systemic inequality of social relationships entailed by the state, the inequality resulting from its essential power structure. Another related aspect of the state, however, should not be ignored: the violence of its actions throughout history. States, of course, do not act; only their governments do so. They act in the name and authority of the state, and are composed of individuals – bureaucrats, officials, magistrates, and legislators – who formulate and execute state policies. Governmental behaviour throughout history is unquestionably influenced by the given structural nature of the state. But despite structural constraints imposed by the state upon actions of governments, they possess in theory, at any rate, considerable latitude in what they do and do not do. Yet past and present actions of government offer a far from edifying spectacle of coercion, deceit, and trickery, a proclivity for inegalitarianism and the exercise of force. Think of the enormity of the crimes committed by governments throughout history: the butchery of constant warfare, the dreadful human toll in the process of industrialization, predatory colonialism and imperialism, the mass movements of populations and forced migrations, genocide, labour camps, torture, execution, and imprisonment. Since the first states, the human costs have been absolutely staggering. Who today can forget that as citizens of a minority of states live in relative security and comfort, so the overwhelming


majority of the world’s population, who have to an important degree rendered possible the enviable conditions of a few, live in hunger, disease, misery, and hopeless, repressive circumstances with nothing to look forward to in the future except the worsening of their grim fate? Who can deny that much of this appalling contrast between plenty and want can be attributed directly or indirectly to the policies and actions of governments of Western states? There can be little reasonable doubt, therefore, that by its very nature the historical state has been stamped by inegalitarianism; and the actions of government, often brutal and oppressive. In addition to its systemic inequality and constant reliance on coercion and violence, fear has also been a fundamental trait of the state. The violence displayed in the past by state and government has obviously inspired fear in foreign enemies and internally among citizens. Fear has always been crucial to maintaining concord within the state.4 If fear of an external enemy has usually been a factor promoting the unity of the state, creating solidarity and social cooperation, and heightening morale, what happens in times of peace and prosperity when survival is no longer at stake? To ensure internal order shrewd politicians can of course fabricate the threat of a hostile foe so as to instil fear in the citizenry, thereby keeping them in line. This was a time-honoured prudential ploy often advocated by social commentators since classical antiquity. So, anxious about the possible divisive consequences for the Roman polity of the demise of Carthage, Publius Nasica constantly opposed the repeated cry of Cato Major for the destruction of the rival power: Delenda est Carthago, ‘Carthage must be destroyed’.5 But there was also another well-known method of inducing social harmony: fear of the ruler in relation to subjects. Fear of an external enemy was internalized and domesticated, and eventually institutionalized in the principle and reality of the absolute, perpetual, lawmaking power of sovereignty so central to the conception of the state fashioned in early modern Europe and continuing to the present. Fear instilled into a populace by governmental threat and exercise of coercive sanctions against law breakers has been a fundamental means of underwriting social unity, again an axiom of conventional wisdom articulated by the notion of sovereignty and practiced in the modern nation-state. The love and respect engendered by ruler among citizens through rewards and protecting and advancing their


interests, naturally, was frequently emphasized by statesmen and political theorists. But in the last analysis, as Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes were well aware, the power of life and death of the sovereign over subjects, the threat and infliction of punishment have been the basic ways by which state and government have secured internal order and unity. The terror of the sovereign power, symbolized by the raised sword, therefore, is not to be slighted in considerations of raison d’état. By itself, however, the fear instilled in citizens by the coercive power of government is not enough to maintain the solidarity, allegiance, and support of citizens. What is needed, in addition, is the firmly implanted idea among them of the legitimacy of their state and government, that official actions are rightful and authoritative. Ideology, the last major feature of the state, has always performed this critical function for the power-holders. The ideology, creating and upholding the authority of state and government, takes many different shapes, and is usually an amalgam of several of them. Symbolic forms of a visual nature, as we shall later see, are all-important. The benevolent behaviour of a ruler, playing the part of loving father or mother as well as stern taskmaster, the splendour, panoply, and dazzling ritual constituting the brilliant setting for his or her every public act, are fostered to move subjects to loyal admiration and unswerving obedience. With much the same aim is the attempt to provide power-holders with the awe-inspiring warrant of religion. Through religion the notion is cultivated that the sovereign is God’s earthly representative, thus transforming every act of government into the sacred act of God, every official pronouncement, the voice of God. The establishment of a single national church is a useful means of inculcating people with this belief, and a state church, of course, profits enormously from such an arrangement. Moreover, a carefully nourished mythology like a myth of the foundation of the state or of a dynastic family, may be crucial in legitimizing governmental power. Related to these types of ideological manipulation is the nurture of a veneration for time-hallowed custom and tradition in order to put a seal of approval on power-holders. Hagiographic chronicles and histories of nations, peoples, and ruling families have a similar goal. The learned words of writers may also help to enhance the loyalty and inspire the educated segment of the populace with dedication to the regime. An appeal to the common good and its identification


are devices for encouraging fealty and devotion. And so we could continue enumerating other ideological instruments – underwritten by the coercive power of state and government – to unify and secure the active support of citizens. Usually the power-holders and their subjects in time become so habituated to these kinds of ideology that they unconsciously accept them as a matter of course. In sum, therefore, if interest is the generator of governmental action, ideology has always been its imprimatur. Reference to domination, interest, inequality, violence, fear and ideology as the hallmarks of the historical state may highlight something about its nature not fully appreciated. We should never forget, however, that the state is perhaps the most ingenious and amazing social artefact devised by humans. What would our life have been like without it? Would our lives have been ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ as Hobbes long ago declared? Notwithstanding its flawed character and heinous crimes, the state has been the cradle of civilized life. Without the state there probably would have been no security and protection from foes, no trade or commerce, no art or literature, no science or technology. Can we be sure that without the state a more benign form of life and social relations would ever have come into being? In assessing the history of the state, the substantial benefit it has bestowed or is capable of conferring must be weighed against its indisputable transgressions and inequities. We should recognize and rethink the paradox of the state and social life, the fragility and limitations as well as the strengths of political activity and governmental arrangements. A fuller awareness of the blemished character of the state may serve as a salutary antidote to the simplistic slogans and claims of nationalist, separatist, and populist movements. If citizens, moreover, come to understand more clearly the imperfections of their state and its essential inegalitarianism, resort to violence, and reliance on fear, they may be more eager to engage in cooperative efforts to improve it, to render its policies and actions more humane and equitable. Of immediate relevance to my project is the thought that if the state and actions of government had been otherwise, there might have been no political theory, for its single unifying theme has been the question of the justice – interpreted in a variety of ways – of state and government. Some theorists – for instance, Plato, More, Winstanley, Rousseau, the Utopian Socialists, Marx – have offered different blueprints for the radical reconstruction of the state in order


to eliminate what each saw in his own way to be its injustice. Others – Aristotle, Cicero, St Thomas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Mill, Hegel – were more concerned with the reform of government and its actions than with the reconstitution of the state itself. What is said by political theorists in their quest for justice may appear – depending on the reader – in some cases misguided or antiquated or even perverse, but the study of political theory should help to stimulate and shape our own thinking and reflection as a preliminary to political action.

2.2 Meaning of politics ‘Politics’ has been variously and sometimes confusingly defined. It is derived from the Greek polis and related terms, and from the Latin adjective, politicus, referring to political activity and to ‘politic’ – prudent, artful, shrewd, crafty. Standard dictionary definitions are of little aid in conveying the precise sense of the word, except that it has to do with government and public policy. In his inaugural lecture of 1951, Michael Oakeshott initially defined politics as ‘the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together. In this sense, families, clubs, and learned societies have their “politics”’.6 Then he adds that ‘this manner of activity is pre-eminent’ in states. Since ‘politics’ in our day has been given an almost universal application – the politics of the family, sexual politics, feminist politics, racial politics, the politics of the labour union, business corporation, university – I shall follow Oakeshott in recognizing it as such, and likewise – given the nature of my enquiry – limit it to activity related to the state. Despite globilization the state today remains as powerful as ever if not more so. Some might agree with David Easton’s objection that restricting the meaning of politics to the state is not very helpful and even misleading because ‘state’ denotes the modern nation-state, and politics occurred in pre-state institutions. Easton, consequently, would confine ‘politics’ to ‘public or social matters’, to how public or social policy is made and executed.7 If, however, as I have maintained, ‘state’ includes institutional structures preceding the modern nation state, then my approach seems justifiable. Politics entails a highly adjustable style of managing human relations, employing numerous techniques, dependent upon the specific


situation. Appearance is the very essence of politics, as both Cicero and Machiavelli long ago emphasized. The skilful politician must be chameleon-like, changing colour according to the circumstances. He or she must be a practical psychologist, instinctively, uncannily, and immediately assessing the strengths and weaknesses of human character. The specific mode must adapt to the who, what, when, and where of the occasion. The truly accomplished political actor is a rarity, requiring to a high degree the traits of self-sacrifice, singlemindedness, decisiveness, toughness, flexibility, and astuteness. Mastery of the art of politics necessitates fixing, retreating, advancing, manipulation, compromise, and brokerage among the concerned parties. Discussion and debate, log-rolling, deals, flattery, trickery, deceit, fraud, and coercion enter the ‘give and take’, the ‘thrust and parry’, the ‘tacking and trimming’ so much a part of political life. A word here, a word there, the quid pro quo, economic pressure, and even terrorism are the currency of politics. Symbols of many sorts – linguistic, visual, auditory – in combination or alone are used by the concerned parties to maintain and legitimate the status quo or to weaken and displace it. Successful engagement with the complexities, difficulties, and subtleties of politics requires singleness of purpose, patience, and determination, something of what Montesquieu may have had in mind in pronouncing that ‘Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression’, a sentiment repeated by Max Weber: ‘Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective’.8 Contest for power and influence induces competition and conflict, so much an integral feature of all politics. The conflict need only be potential, not necessarily overt, but always under the surface, ever ready to break forth and disrupt the existing order of things. Even where consensus and cooperation apparently prevail, conflict may occur on a specific issue, which intended or not endangers established relationships. Consummate political actors anticipate, prepare for, and gird themselves for the unexpected: fortune’s bolt out of the blue. The unpredictable consequences may require the immediate call to action and the coolness, courage, and dedication of political leaders. Fluidity and instability are the stuff of politics. Power relationships may remain relatively undisturbed, in peace and quiet for a generation, a lifetime, a century, unmarred by serious upheaval, only to be swept away by a transformative tidal wave.


The brilliant political practitioner learns his or her skill not from books and controlled experiments like scientists.9 The knowledge, judgement, and wisdom of philosopher or sage are not those of political virtuosi of the calibre of Augustus Caesar, Henri of Navarre, Disraeli, and Bismarck, to name only a few. Their knowledge is essentially non-specifiable. A handbook of political strategy and tactics, no matter how detailed and well studied, will never enable the consummate politician to master the craft, any more than memorization of Escoffier makes a great chef. Between knowing the rules and the action itself, there is an indefinable and mysterious gap that can only be crossed instinctively, by one possessing an intuitive feel for the realm of action, for what must be done. This is no less true of the superb politician than the military, artistic, and literary genius, an Alexander the Great, a Rembrandt, or a Shakespeare. Comparable to the successful military commander’s coup d’oeil the master of the political art can take in at a glance a complex situation with all its fluctuating factors, penetrate to its core and act with energy, decisiveness, and boldness. A grasp of human relations and social behaviour is sharpened and refined by long experience. The wisdom of the masterful politician is of a practical, not a speculative nature. The great politician is inexplicably favoured by fortune. He or she is the indefatigable survivor and master of political skill because of good luck. Perhaps in acting as they do, political masters create conditions to bless them at every significant turn. They are also accomplished in the art of timing their every critical political act, knowing instinctively when something should be done or not done. However politics is conceived, broadly or narrowly, most agree that it has to do with power, roughly in line with Weber’s formulation at the beginning of the last century that politics ‘means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state’.10 A question usually raised is whether all power is political, or whether all politics entails the exercise of power. Normally, power is conceived of as the allinclusive category, whereas politics is a sub-category, a special use of power. Not all power, it follows, is political, but all politics involves power. In opposition to this view, I shall suggest that every exercise of power usually contains some element of the political, exceedingly small in some instances, large and important in others, as in the state.


To move from the abstract to the concrete, what is customarily meant by power? It commonly refers to a human relationship in which one or more individuals collectively or institutionally exercise their wills over and attempt to control the actions and opinions of other individuals or groups of individuals. Politics essentially entails this kind of relationship, usually a multiplicity of exceedingly complex ones. The relationships involved in the exercise of political power, are hierarchical, divisions between command and obedience, domination and subordination. Politics characterizes situations in which one or more persons attempt to dominate others, or to preserve and improve a dominant role once acquired. Conversely, subordinates in the power relationship either actively support their dominators, passively acquiesce to their command, remain indifferent, or try to change or replace the existing system of control. Politics attempts to generate and conserve power or weaken and displace power. What of the question of whether all power relationships are political? Every political relationship is certainly one of power. On the other hand, a power relationship, purified of all political elements, is difficult to imagine. What kind of power relationship within our experience completely lacks even the smallest political element? Some examples of power relationships in pristine form, seemingly devoid of politics, are those of master and slave, jailer and prisoner, officer and soldier. In each instance, however, the subordinate may try to lighten or relieve his or her arduous functions in numerous ways: through doing favours beyond the line of duty for the dominator, through absolute obedience and cooperation, through flattery, obsequiousness, and guile. Likewise the power-holder may seek to render the subordinate compliant, cooperative, and supportive by stern kindness, civility, humour, firmness, and detachment, instead of harsh, inhumane, and dictatorial treatment. These mutual interactions are at core political. Slaves, prisoners, and soldiers, furthermore, are part of the system of power in which subordinates far outnumber power-holders. The individual power relationship in each case does not comprise an isolated face-to-face society on a desert island. The prevention of slave uprisings requires prudent conduct of masters, and conversely slave revolts invoke secrecy, planning, and organization. Much of the same is true of jailer and prisoner, and officer and soldier.


In each of these instances the appearance of the exercise of pure power proves on closer examination to be political to some extent. If not, the likelihood of the survival of the power relationship is very tenuous and may well dissolve. And if all power, even of the most brutal and ruthless sort is, to recall Hobbes and Hume, fundamentally opinion, then all power possesses a political ingredient, small in some, large in others. Hobbes makes the point in inimitable fashion: ‘for if men know not their duty, what is there that can force them to obey the laws? An army, you will say. But what shall force the army?’.11 The political component, of course, minute as it may be in a ‘pure power relationship’, depends upon the rationality (in a means-end sense) of both power holder and subordinate. If either or both are irrational, no prudential checks exist on the exercise of power or the response to it. In such cases the power relationship seems destined to end in the destruction of either the power-holder, or the subordinate, or both. Or if the subordinate is a saint, the political would seem to be virtually non-existent. When power is simply the perverse application of brutality, the political in the purest power relationship all but disappears. The political is always a limit on power, providing it is exerted by and upon humans of normal mental faculties and who are neither saints nor recreants. Under normal circumstances, then, most power relationships even of the purest type are to some extent political, and all politics is characterized by power. The reference to power and opinion raises the further problem of power and authority. If as Hobbes and Hume maintain, power is basically opinion, it follows that there can be no fundamental distinction between power and authority. Where there is power there must always be authority. The two appear in reality to be always proportional and inseparable. A decline in power means a loss of authority, and a decrease of the latter suggests a reduction of the former. But is this indeed true? Cannot we say that a certain king, or prelate, or professor has great authority, is esteemed and venerated by subordinates, but exercises very little power? And conversely, cannot we affirm that a tyrannical ruler possesses enormous power, but has lost the admiration, awe, and allegiance of his subjects, and thereby lacks authority? In each instance, upon closer scrutiny, however, authority and power appear to be intimately connected. In the first, authority seems to carry with it the ability to exercise one’s will over the utterances and actions of subordinates; and in the second, the tyrant’s


power, because of the erosion of authority, would seem to be weak, in fact so weak that both power and office may eventually be lost. Great power seems to involve authority, and in turn the highest authority displays some power. The relationship of power and authority requires further clarification. The exercise of power does not necessarily depend on physical force or its threat, or their equivalent. Compliance with the powerholder’s will may in some instances result more from compelling and persuasive reasons bound up with custom, tradition, merit, age, religion, and interest than from forcible sanctions. The absence of physical coercion does not mean a lack of power, for example, in relatively egalitarian and non-stratified societies without a state, where collective decisions are made on the basis of the authority of individuals of prestige, differing perhaps in accord with the circumstances. Despite the lack of coercive force, the distinguished professor or the constitutional monarch because of the respect and acclaim they command in different ways, can through their authority exert important degrees of power. A limited constitutional monarch in a parliamentary democracy holds office of very little actual power. The monarch, nevertheless, can still exercise appreciable power – not of a formal or legal nature – by skilfully fashioning an aura of authority, thereby winning the regard, deference, and loyalty of subjects. When, perhaps because of failure to set a wholesome, useful, and creative example to the nation, the high authority is allowed to wither away, so will power erode. Authority, then, without the means of physical compulsion tends to create power. In general, power and authority seem to be incremental and mutually sustaining. If the essence of politics is power, that power is wedded to authority. This is why even the purest power relationship, if it is to be durable, must in most cases contain some element of the political in order to ensure an increment of authority. Politics, therefore, is apparently a universal phenomenon stamped by power relationships. Nowhere is politics more pronounced, extensive, and concentrated than in activity related to the state. By its nature, the state draws into its vortex many kinds of human activity and politicizes it. The state is politics writ large, its very being and life blood. But power (and hence politics) in the state differs fundamentally from power in non-state societies or power exercised by distinguished professors and venerated constitutional monarchs. Power in


the state rests ultimately upon sanctions of physical force. Such reliance in the state seems due to its systemic inegalitarianism. How else in the final analysis are the state’s structural inequalities between rulers and ruled, the non-labouring and labouring, the rich and the poor, to be preserved except through physical coercion? Politics, of course, reflects the hierarchy, domination and subordination, and inequality of the social divisions entailed by the state, and is concerned with the maintenance and strengthening or the weakening and alteration of the divisions. The state organizes, institutionalizes, and routinizes politics. At the same time, no state can long exist by coercive penalties alone. This is why authority is so crucial to the physiology of state power, and why politics and ideological control have such a vital role in fashioning state authority, thus ensuring a further increase of power independent of the use of coercion. Some commentators confine the meaning of politics to a particular constellation of values. Instead of empirically describing and identifying politics, they restrict its definition to activity of a specific normative configuration. One of the better known of such efforts is that exemplified by Hannah Arendt, especially in The Human Condition (1958), ably summarized by Bikhu Parekh: … politics is an activity in which men collectively take charge of their destiny and reshape the world. In acting and initiating new processes, they experience freedom, disclose their unique individual identity, and give to their lives and their world a meaning and a sense of significance. Politics is therefore an arena of speech and action, of noble words and great deeds.12 While for Arendt politics is a testing ground of human character, a means of self-emancipation and self-fulfilment through memorable words and heroic actions, for others it is by comparison a more modest enterprise. Politics in a real sense is for them the embodiment of liberal values and procedures: toleration, recognition of divergent views and opinions, acceptance of contending interests, persuasion by discussion and debate, the peaceful resolution of conflict, and the distribution of power for the public good.13 Associated in this way with responsible constitutional government and the rule of law, and reflecting the liberal dispositions of its proponents, politics to be politics in a true sense does not necessarily have to be democratic.


It may be restricted, as M. I. Finley has observed, to a narrow group dominating the affairs of state at a particular time in history, an aristocracy or oligarchy, and as such was the invention of the ancient Greeks and Romans.14 In their own ways Arendt and the liberals equally romanticize politics, tending to envisage it from their different perspectives in the idealistic terms of ‘the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’, to appropriate the title of one of Michael Oakeshott’s essays. They so narrow its meaning as to exclude much human activity related to the state commonly recognized to be political. Legislative budget days and lengthy debates over economic policy, no matter how vital to the actual political process, for Arendt would not be authentically political. No more would much of the politics of authoritarian regimes, modern dictatorships and totalitarianism as well as ancient tyrannies meet the standard set by liberals who identify politics with a specific trait of contemporary constitutional government, noted by Weber: ‘To an outstanding degree, politics today is in fact conducted in public by means of the spoken or written word’.15

2.3 Symbolic forms and politics Politics comprehends not only action but also a wide variety of symbolic forms, verbal as well as non-verbal. The written and spoken word is obviously a most crucial factor. Today mass circulation newspapers and magazines, paperbacks; the ubiquitous radio, television, movie, computer, photostat, and fax, make language even more critical to politics than before. Throughout history language has been a primary means of politics in communicating matters of life and death and bread and butter issues. People are aroused and mobilized for action, rallied in time of need, and find expression for their goals and ambitions. One need only think of dramatic instances: Pericles’ funeral oration, as recounted by Thucydides; Edmund Burke’s indictment of Warren Hastings; Roosevelt’s ‘fire-side chats’; Hitler’s mesmerizing the masses at Nuremburg; or Churchill’s courageous eloquence during the Second World War. Words are the instruments of formulating, explaining, and justifying public policy; of translating policies into directives and laws, of instructing bureaucrats, of solidifying and articulating interests, of resolving disputes and rendering judicial decisions, and of generating enthusiastic loyalty and maintaining authority.


In making all these very obvious points, however, it should never be forgotten that politics involves much more than written and oral verbalization. The reductio ad absurdum of politics to little more than language tends to trivialize it, demeaning a human activity upon which so much depends. Politics is an extremely serious human project touching in varying degrees the lives of us all. Without politics and the social order it brings, there would be even less security than we already possess, and little in the way of civilized life. Although in practice politics may fail to do so, it offers the only prospect for a relatively comfortable life free from uncertainty and anxiety. Politics has to do with the perilous straits of humans throughout the world: famine, poverty, disease, displacement, unemployment, homelessness, oppression, and exploitation. Far from being abstractions, these are real life situations confronted by most of the global population. At the hub of politics, moreover, are actions, only in part verbal, directly resulting from the everyday struggle for survival and existence: protests, demonstrations, strikes, vagabondage, banditry, ethnic-cleansing, revolts, warfare, imprisonment, torture, execution, terrorism, kidnapping, and exile. How many of us have tried to cut through the bureaucratic maze of modern government; have dealt with the obscurantism and delaying tactics of public officials; have been interrogated by police, by magistrates, by legislative committees; or have won or lost a political contest? Words may in part explain, condemn, uphold, and rationalize some of these activities and their outcomes, but they fall far short in even suggesting the full extent of the sorrow and hardship, the pain and suffering entailed by many of them. They have to be directly felt, they often have to be personally experienced, in order to be fully appreciated and believed. Art and literature convey something of the tragedy and drama, the heartache and sacrifice of much of this array of human behaviour, but the reduction of politics to language simply degrades it. How can politics possibly be identified with the written word (and even with the spoken word) in early food-gathering cultures, in contemporary non-literate societies, in a world today where a substantial portion of the population neither reads nor writes, or even in our own society with its rapidly increasing functional illiteracy? Since a sizeable segment of the current global population is non-literate, and since historically even the most economically advanced states have only recently achieved a high literacy rate, the equation of politics with language seems problematic at best.


In other words, despite the undoubted significance of language, politics has always been intimately and importantly associated with other symbolic forms. A very large non-verbal component characterizes politics in all societies, designed to appeal to and manipulate the visual and auditory senses. Monumental public buildings, overwhelming statuary, patriotic paintings, didactic frescoes, satirical cartoons, inspiring music, striking uniforms and gorgeous costumes, emblems and badges, poignantly impressive ceremonies, stirring parades, and awesome ritual, are all at the heart of political activity. Renaissance city-state governments clearly understood that painting could be a potent instrument in advancing and maintaining their power, one of the earliest examples being Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘Good and Bad Government’ (1338–40) adorning the town hall of Siena. Secular frescoes in Italian public buildings were commissioned during the next two centuries in order to transmit to the citizenry a number of important political messages: the dire consequences of tyranny, the benefits of a well-ordered polity, the virtues of republicanism and its links with antiquity, the authority of the ruler, and the appropriate ranking of the social hierarchy. In our own day, the fact that male Labourites in the British House of Commons have replaced their tweeds with smart double-breasted business suits is a rather banal illustration of the salience of visual imagery in politics. All of this is the stuff of politics aimed at impressing citizens, persuading them in Walter Bagehot’s memorable lines on the English monarchy to ‘defer … [to] the theatrical show of society. A certain state passes before them; a certain pomp of great men; a certain spectacle of beautiful women; a wonderful scene of wealth and enjoyment is displayed, and they are coerced by it. Their imagination is bowed down; they feel they are not equal to the life which is revealed to them’.16 The vital non-verbal element in political activity was recognized long before Bagehot. Faced with Puritan criticisms of time-hallowed Catholic ritual and ceremony adopted by the Anglican Church, Richard Hooker responded that because the outward form of religious actions is the instruction and improvement of believers, speech must be supplemented by other ‘sensible means … especially those means which being object to the eye, the liveliest and the most apprehensive sense of all other, have in that respect seemed the fittest to make a deep and a strong impression’.17 Hooker then


astutely observes that every significant public action has been attended by ‘some visible solemnity’ whose unusual quality ‘doth cause popular eyes to observe and to mark the same. Words, both because they are common, and do not so strongly move the fancy of man, are for the most part but slightly heard …’. Custom has required ‘certain sensible actions’ to accompany words since the memory of the actions ‘is far more easy and durable than the memory of speech can be’. Hooker’s reflections are of some profundity when applied to politics. Words in the political forum may be heard, but are seldom understood, much less remembered. Citizens seem more deeply influenced by eye-catching ceremony and sacramental rites, by panoply and splendour, pomp and circumstance, or mundane acts like handshaking, gestures, and flag-burning than by white papers, the commentary of pundits, and learned treatises. Khrushchev’s pounding the table with his shoe at the United Nations will be remembered long after his words are forgotten. Visible acts of this kind and far more serious and decorous ones engrave the psyches of citizens, often eliciting from them loyalty and respect much more than the noble sentiments of eloquent orations, or even the slogans and catch-phrases of press and pamphlet, not to mention informed analyses, usually disappearing into oblivion as soon as they are printed. Other thinkers about the time of Hooker also dwelt upon the significance of non-verbal symbolism in society and politics. Montaigne gave attention to the importance of ceremony and ritual in manipulating the populace, affirming that ‘there is no polity in which there is not some admixture either of empty ceremony or of lying opinion to serve as a curb to keep the people in their duty’.18 Pascal concentrates on the minute details of symbolism in its role of bolstering the status quo. ‘Kings accompanied by guards, drums, officers, and all the things which bend the human machine towards respect and awe’ are a force even when the rulers are seen alone ‘because we cannot in thought separate their persons from the paraphernalia which is generally seen to go with them’.19 Fine dress and accomplished toiletry of great personages are not merely a display of vanity, for they show that many people are employed to be so attired, and hence are a symbol of power: ‘To be well-dressed is to exhibit your strength’.20 Pascal adds that ‘a man clad in brocade and followed by seven or eight lackeys … will have me thrashed if I fail to


salute him. This is because his fine coat is a force. It is just the same with a horse in rich trappings compared with another’.21 Much later Edmund Burke in his classic on aesthetics offers a ‘psychological’ explanation of the effectiveness of non-verbal symbolism as an instrument of power, although he is only implicit about politics.22 Burke distinguishes between the aesthetic qualities of the sublime and beautiful, those psychologically rooted in the perceiver in fear and self-preservation, and those in love and affection. A major source of the sublime in the actions we witness is power, which inspires terror, awe, astonishment, admiration, and deference in the beholder. The notions of king, commander, and God produce the idea of power arising from terror. In discussing causes of the sublime other than power, Burke makes no reference to state and government, but the political application seems fairly obvious. One source of the sublime is the ‘artificial infinite’: in architecture, a long succession of columns; in nature, an avenue of trees. Other sources of the sublime are vastness of building, loudness and suddenness of sounds, and ‘magnificence’, defined as ‘a great profusion of things’, in a variety of objects – orations, buildings, costumes, ceremony – which are characterized by grandeur and splendour. The transfer of these traits to politics, as Burke does in his later writings and orations, suggests the majesty of the English constitution, an intricate organic growth over time. No expression is perhaps more applicable to Burke’s thought or to his milieu than ‘theatre of politics’, which also brings to mind Bagehot’s ‘theatrical spectacle’ of the monarchy. Burke and his predecessors – joined later by Bagehot, Graham Wallas, and Walter Lippman – convincingly reason that there is much more to politics and the exercise of power than words alone. While language is fundamental to politics, the centrality of non-verbal symbols and actions cannot be ignored. So far where do we stand? I have argued that the state is a complex, institutional hierarchy of power. It is a structure of domination, interest, inequality, violence, fear and ideology, the central feature of which is the distinction between rulers and ruled, and in varying degrees between the economic haves and have nots. All states, therefore, have been marked by a systemic inequality in social relationships. The state, moreover, has existed since its origins fundamentally on the basis of the use of coercion and violence and the fear it has thus instilled in external foes and among its own citizens.


Ideological manipulation by the state has also been crucial for the maintenance of its authority. Despite its inherent inegalitarianism and dependence on violence and fear cushioned by ideology, the state has undoubtedly been responsible for much that we treasure. Politics reflects the paradoxical nature of the state. Politics is the activity of preserving or changing the complicated interrelationships of hierarchy, domination, subordination, and inequality so essential to the state, and of guiding its policy and activity. Politics is characterized by conflict, competition, and cooperation; by discussion and coercion; by fluidity and stability. The written and spoken word is vital to politics in influencing the conduct and beliefs of individuals and groups, and in making policies and rules. But non-verbal symbols and actions also have a critical role and function. Politics is a complex, entangled, and arduous enterprise. Yet without politics, without its paradoxical combination of reason with unreason, of debate and persuasion with fraud and force, and without the genuine benefits of a civilized life of security and well-being sometimes achieved, human beings might have been subjected to ordeals far more nasty, brutish, and short than now experienced.

3 Character of Political Theory

Now that we have some understanding of state and politics, we are better placed to deal with the character of political theory. I have chosen ‘political theory’ in preference to ‘political thought’, which seems far too broad in meaning; and to ‘political philosophy’ as too narrow in scope. ‘Political thought’ is so general as to include anything from a party election manifesto or an official governmental report or the impressions of a newspaper columnist to a learned treatise. ‘Political philosophy’, on the other hand appears to be too systematic, holistic, and conceptually technical – the archetypal figures being Plato, Aristotle, St Thomas, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Hegel – to include many of the authors of paramount importance in our genre. What do we do with Cicero, not as much of a philosopher as he claimed, whose primary political works – De re publica and De legibus, and even De officiis – are not technically philosophic; or likewise with Locke’s Two Treatises, philosophic only rather loosely speaking, and whose great philosophic work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is usually unexamined by students of his political ideas? Moreover, it might be possible to write a history of political theory without detailed discussion of Spinoza, Hume, and Kant. And what of Adam Smith, a moral philosopher by inclination and profession, but whose political ideas are only imprecisely philosophic; or Marx, philosopher by training, whose seminal writings are more systematically economic and historical than technically philosophic? More importantly, what would the history of our subject be like if we were to excise virtuosi who by no stretch of the imagination were system builders or technically 39


philosophers? Imagine a catalogue of Western European political ideas without reference to Polybius, Marsiglio, Machiavelli, More, Bodin, Grotius, Winstanley, Harrington, Pufendorf, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Paine, Madison, Bentham, the Mills, and Tocqueville? Yet they are far more systematic, perceptive, and ground-breaking than the average pundit; and Rousseau, at least (and sometimes Machiavelli and others) is included in any list of the greats of our subject, whereas some of the philosophers are not. In regard to influence, nebulous as it may be, many of the non-philosophic figures score more highly than some of the philosophers. For these reasons, I have chosen ‘political theory’ as a convenient mean between extremes, neither excluding the less than systematic and technically philosophic, but challenging and influential ideas of some; nor including an infinite range of political commentary. Of even shorter duration than the over five-thousand-year-old history of the state, has been the course of political theory, first appearing possibly about 500 BC or before in regions – the Near East, China, and India – where primary states emerged during the fifth millennium BC. Much of this early speculation about government and politics consisted of aphoristic, fragmentary comments: monarchical and moralistic in tone. It was often embedded in a religious outlook, venerating tradition, and preoccupied with the formulation of arcana imperii and the conduct of war and foreign relations. About the same time, the beginnings of political theory as we know it, of a systematic, analytic, rational, and critical kind, arose in fifth-century BC Greece, especially in Athens, and flourished in the following century. If Athens can be called the birthplace of political theory, not all theorists were Athenians. Athens, however, became a centre for teachers – the sophists or wise men – who taught pupils for fees. Among them were Protagoras and Socrates although the latter did not charge his students; and there were others like the atomists, Democritus being the most prominent. Unfortunately, their voluminous works have been lost, and we can learn of their ideas only from fragments and through Plato and Aristotle. The thought of Socrates, who left no written legacy, can only be gleaned from the early dialogues of Plato. Out of this vibrant cultural milieu came Plato himself and later: Aristotle, Epicurus, the Cynics, the Skeptics, and early Stoics. The dialogues of Plato, especially his account of the teachings of Protagoras in the dialogue bearing his

Character of Political Theory 41

name, and the Republic, Statesman, and Laws, mark the real beginnings of political theory. Why political theory emerged and flourished at this particular time and place is a matter of conjecture. One vital factor undoubtedly was the development since the ninth century BC of the unique Greek state, the polis, sometimes evolving into self-governing democracies, as in Athens from the early fifth to the late fourth century. Another related cause was that by the end of the fifth century, Greece was becoming a literate culture – the written word starting to replace the spoken word as the main means of transmitting knowledge – and one of a fair degree of literacy.1 Still another factor may have been the prosperity of Athens coupled with popular rule that required widespread and searching discussion of vexing social and political issues and brought an increasing demand for schooling and teaching. An economically vital, democratic and relatively free culture with a growing means of written expression and exact argumentation and an increasing audience for such discourse, therefore, created an atmosphere favourable to the birth and early thriving of political theory. Whatever the explanation, the ancient Greeks bequeathed to the world a powerful and ingenious mode of self-examination and reflection continuing to the present.

3.1 Political theorist as ‘a reformer of politicks’ Although ‘political theory’ apparently joins two contradictory terms, upon closer inspection the difference between them disappears. ‘Theory’, derived from the Greek theôriá, denotes mental viewing or contemplation; whereas politics has to do with praxis or activity, the use of power for particular ends. Plato simultaneously resolves the dichotomy and offers an important insight into the nature of political theory.2 He begins the relevant passage in Theaetetus by saying that it is only the body of the contemplative man that resides in the state, ‘while his thought, disdaining all such things as worthless, takes wings’, in Pindar’s words ‘“beyond the sky, beneath the earth”’. Plato continues that when Thales the father of philosophy with eyes fixed on the stars fell down a well, the maidservant ‘scoffed at him for being so eager about what was happening in the sky that he could not see what lay at his feet’. When, however, the contemplative person or theorist directs his attention, Plato maintains, to mundane


things, the situation is reversed. It is not the earthbound mortal who has eyes upon the stars when the theorist asks: “What injustice have I done to you or you to me?” and to think about justice and injustice in themselves, what each is, and how they differ from one another and from anything else, or to stop quoting poetry about the happiness of kings or of men with gold in store and think about the meaning of kingship and the whole question of human happiness and misery, what their nature is, and how humanity can gain the one and escape the other. … These words capture the essence of political theory, suggesting that the theorist’s major concern is with justice and that his perception of the state’s activity penetrates and transcends the experience and comprehension of ordinary citizens who nevertheless are the objects and subjects in the exercise of governmental power. Political theory, therefore, is not any set of observations about state and politics, but a mental viewing with a distinctive intellectual purpose, and, as we shall see, a practical thrust and posture. Political theorists have always been far less interested in who actually rules – the individuals and groups wielding political power – than with who should or ought to rule, and how their power should be employed. Why is this the case? Is it merely out of intellectual curiosity, an insatiable appetite for knowledge and understanding? One of the masters of the craft, John Locke, declared in the First Treatise of Government: ‘The great Question which in all Ages has disturbed Mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those Mischiefs which have ruin’d Cities, depopulated Countries, and disordered the Peace of the World, has been, Not whether there be Power in the World, nor whence it came, but who should have it.’3 The political theorist, to take liberty with Locke’s term, is ‘a Reformer of Politicks’, whose analysis of who should rule is directed to recommendations for the correction of existing political and social difficulties and abuses in the name of justice. Theorists are thus engaged in normative enquiries, not in the purely empirical or descriptive investigation of who actually rules, but they may have to address the latter question in their handling of the former one. The normative conclusions of the theorist are never of the true or false variety, characterized either by certainty or uncertainty. They occupy that grey area, the intellectual


limbo where ‘truth’ consists of the marshalling of sets of cogent reasons in support of political recommendations, not of solutions to problems as in mathematical or logical proofs, although the theorist may disguise them as such. In their normative explorations and reflections, theorists offer reasons in support of views as to why some should rule and some should not, and how that rule should be exercised. Differing answers to the question of who should rule in the final analysis depend upon a theorist’s effort to define (not necessarily explicitly and usually very broadly) the nature of a just political society: just in its government arrangements, policies, and actions. Since justice appears to be a central preoccupation of the political theorist, an extremely brief comment on the meaning of the term may be in order, although numerous weighty and erudite tomes have been written on the subject. Justice in Western culture has always been considered one of the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. In Italian, French, and German (giustizia, justice, justiz) the words are practically identical with our own, derived from the Latin, ius and iustitia. Justice has generally meant what is rightful, fair, equitable, lawful, and rational. In a court of law, justice signifies whether the verdict of punishment for the guilty is proportionate to the harm done to the victim. In the social and political realm, justice has usually referred to the distribution of offices, honours, and rewards to each citizen. Are they proportionate to the citizens’ status or contribution to the community? ‘To each his or her due’ is the guiding principle of both kinds of justice. Political theorists, therefore, in their particular reflections on justice are concerned as to whether the state in its structure and activity is fair, equitable, and rightful. Only rarely (as noted in the previous chapter) is the theorist concerned with reconstructing and transforming the state itself into a just structure, for example as did Plato, More, Winstanley, Harrington, Rousseau, the Utopian Socialists, and Marx. The political theorist as ‘a Reformer of Politicks’ has been largely content with the somewhat more modest project of emphasizing the injustice of his or her own political society and prescribing the means of rendering political life more just. This enterprise requires the search for fundamental political and social principles which will best serve to inform and shape governmental institutions, policies, and actions, and


provide the basis for comparing various political societies. No matter how a just political society is envisioned, the theorist must convince readers that the position adopted is rightful, rationally compelling, capable of realization (at least in some modified form), and beneficial in its practical results. As ‘a Reformer of Politicks’, the political theorist is not merely indulging in an intellectual exercise, or playing some kind of elaborate language game. Theorists are engaged on eminently practical projects with the most serious implications for the real world. What could be more down-to-earth and so removed from star gazing than a preoccupation with the normative grounding of the state, the institutional complex that so shapes and influences our lives, that brooks no rival within its jurisdiction, and possesses the power of life and death over each of us? Political theorists not only write in defence of the status quo, but also in the passionate hope of changing state and society for the better. Most of the major theorists were themselves political actors with a first-hand grasp of politics, and not mere spinners of words. One needs only cite Plato’s ill-fated missions to Syracuse and the far from negligible political function of the Academy; Aristotle’s close connections with the royal house of Macedonia and likely service as its political agent; Polybius’ military and political service to the Achaean League; Cicero’s tenures as Consul and Pro-Consul in the late Roman Republic, membership in the Senate, and ruthless suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy; St Augustine’s North African struggle with the Donatists and circumcellion terrorism; John of Salisbury’s alliance with St Thomas Becket against Henry II of England; Marsiglio of Padua’s close relationship to Ludwig of Bavaria in conflict with Pope John XXII; Jean Gerson’s activism in the conciliarist movement; Nicolas of Cusa’s brilliant diplomatic and administrative efforts on behalf of the papacy; Sir John Fortescue’s active political and polemical role in support of the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses; Machiavelli’s long labours as a Florentine republican official; More’s parliamentary career before publication of Utopia and later role as Lord Chancellor; Bodin’s membership in the Estates-General of Blois and position as Procurator of Lyons; Locke’s close association with Shaftesbury and the Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis; Montesquieu’s presidency of the Parlement of Bordeaux; Rousseau’s post as secretary to the French ambassador in


Venice; Burke’s two decades in the Commons, office as Pay-master General, and leading part in the impeachment and trial of Warren Hastings; Tocqueville’s governmental service climaxed by the portfolio of Foreign Affairs; J. S. Mill’s relations with the Radicals, employment by the East India Company, and election to Parliament; Marx’s involvement in working-class politics; and T. H. Green’s activity in local politics. If as a group they were not especially distinguished – often holding only minor posts or performing minor functions – or successful in the political arena, at least they were not detached observers or ivory tower thinkers. To perceive them as other than individuals of decided practical inclinations as well as of singular mental endowments who sought concrete remedies for the political and social troubles of their times is to misunderstand and distort the nature of their activity. Suffice it to say now that theory in the classic mould has usually flourished in times of intense social and political conflict. (Chapter 4 will be devoted to the matter.) Whatever the issues, political theorists were seldom neutral disinterested spectators of the social and political turmoil about them. Their theorizing was in response to the conflict which touched off the particular mode of intellectual activity they had chosen. They attempted to understand and define the fundamental practical questions and problems and indicate a way of resolving them. Out of the sometimes chaotic conditions of their days, they embarked upon a quest for order of a concrete, practical kind. The political theorist was often a partisan in the conflict, making some kind of basic commitment to a particular social and political position. Not that the stance was always identical with that of an actual party in the struggle, for the theorist was usually more than a run of the mill party hack, ideologue, or propagandist. Sometimes, as with Hobbes, the views of the theorist antagonized all contending groups. At other times the theorist might reject neutrality, and support one faction or another. So Locke devoted his talents to the cause of the Shaftesbury Whigs. The major political theorists are fascinating because of their singleness of purpose, their complete dedication to a cause, the concentration upon a single problem or issue, sometimes at the expense of a more moderate, dispassionate, and accurate assessment of the situation. Once staking out a claim, they defended it with all the weapons in their considerable intellectual armouries. They may have


disguised their partisanship in the garb of searching for and revealing universal truths. Or on the other hand, they may also have believed that they were actually revealing universal truths. Behind their profession of dispassionate intentions and disinterested intellectualism, however, might lurk a tenacious loyalty to a particular social class, style of conduct, and set of political arrangements. Political theorists were individuals of extraordinary and penetrating vision, seeing with a single eye, to recall a sentiment of J. S. Mill, what lesser intellects might fail to perceive with both eyes. Now to the particulars of characterizing historical political theory. Is there a similar structure of thought of the theorists, at least most of them, that justifies the appellation of a distinctive mode of discourse? Not that there is or has to be an identical pattern, but is there a common style of thinking or approach to political and social problems? Obviously they all offer a mental view of state and politics, but how are their reflections to be differentiated, if at all, from the pronouncements of pundits and propagandists? Is there more holding together the web of ideas spun by the theorists than the fact that all were talented individuals, some of genius, masters of their language, superb craftsmen of an intellectual brief, most of whom were writing in periods of basic structural transformation and political conflict, and assumed a partisanship, either concealed or visible? Each is ‘a Reformer of Politicks’. Do their differing calls for reform exhibit common traits? My case for the homologous configuration of their thought rests upon recognition of its multi-dimensional character, and the identification of three of the most critical dimensions or clusters of elements. Naturally there are more, but these three seem to represent some kind of common denominator or style of approach. The first, a more or less hidden one, I shall label the generative dimension, consisting of those ideas, values, and attitudes, perhaps not immediately apparent to the reader, often assumed by the theorist instead of being explicitly stated, which move him to theorize in the first place and comprise the energizing and informing force of the whole project. The second, the most visible and obvious feature for every reader, the novice as well as the experienced, is the prescriptive dimension, the specific recommendations for social and political reform and change. The third, possibly somewhat less apparent than the second, but more so than the first, is the persuasive dimension, the rhetorical and intellectual devices deployed by theorists


to justify and rationalize their schemes for the reform of politics, to convince readers that theirs is the only feasible direction to be taken for practical action.

3.2 The generative dimension Under this rubric can be included a variety of beliefs, opinions, values, and assumptions which move the theorist to take pen to paper. Generative elements comprise the motor driving, giving direction to, and moulding much of the substance of the thought of the theorist. They are the political and social passions brought to focus, ordered, canalized, and intellectualized by the theorizing endeavour. Among the most important is some initial political commitment, ‘primitive’ in the sense of first and usually ill-defined. In an effort to define and refine it, to order and articulate it, the theorist embarks on a voyage of intellectual discovery. While a classic political theory cannot be reduced to ideology, it does contain important ideological ingredients, as we shall see, and the ideological traits are most prominent in the generative dimension. No political theory is free of ideology. The impulse for theorizing and the social values and assumptions of the theorist are in large measure ideological, not in themselves the result of dispassionate enquiry and reasoned argument, but their impetus. A political theory – in one or in several volumes or essays written at different times – is a bold and ingenious attempt to argue systematically and persuasively for the original commitment. In the process it may be modified, but is seldom discarded. Sometimes prudence may have dictated a switch in basic allegiance. Beginning as an ardent conciliarist, Nicolas of Cusa later sided with the pope. A supporter of Boniface VIII against his former pupil Philip IV of France, Aegidius Romanus, upon the death of the pope, received the favour of the King. After the demise of Henry VI, Sir John Fortescue, a lifelong protagonist of the Lancastrian cause, apparently joined the council of the Yorkist sovereign, Edward IV, for whom he possibly wrote The Governance of England. Perhaps the basic commitment has not been held throughout the mature life of the theorist, resulting instead from a sudden perception or memorable experience, even an apocalyptic vision on the road to Damascus; or it may mellow and change as the years pass.


Locke was not always a ‘liberal’, nor Marx always a socialist, nor Burke always a ‘conservative’. The intellectual and political difference between the middle-aged Plato of The Republic and the old man of The Statesman and Laws has probably been exaggerated; however, there seems little doubt that St Augustine, a Ciceronian in his youth, even after his conversion to Christianity in Milan did not become an ardent proponent of predestination until his last years when he witnessed the destruction of his Roman imperial world. Mill rejected Benthamism only after his nervous breakdown and discovery of literature and history; and Green moved gradually leftward in response to changes in British society. The initial impulse setting the theorist along the path of theorizing is more obvious in some than in others. The political doctrine of The Republic and the last works should surprise no one familiar with Plato’s deep fear of Athenian democracy and distress over the death of his revered mentor and friend Socrates, in his eyes martyred by the ‘many-headed hydra’. Coupled with that tragedy was Plato’s association with the Pythagoreans of southern Italy from whom he probably imbibed a conception of ultimate being and notion of the tri-partite soul, a possible excursion to Egypt (like Isocrates mistakenly perceiving it as a caste society), and the failure of his first visit to Syracuse, dashing any immediate hope of transforming an actual ruler into a philosopher. Cicero’s mature social and political thought, it is arguable, was at bottom the vigorous and eloquent expression – as conditions in Rome worsened – of the conservative ideology gleaned at an impressionable age from his first teachers, a distinguished clique of oligarchs. His loyal dedication to republican Rome, ‘nothing in the world is more precious to me’, which he cherished more than life itself was echoed by Machiavelli from Forli in 1527, the year of his death: ‘I love my native city more than my own soul.’4 Despite their differences, both thinkers were joined by a life-long ardour for republicanism and desire to revitalize their states, by an astute political realism, and by a distrust of democracy. Their shared passion for politics is reflected by the Florentine’s confession from exile some months before completing The Prince: ‘I don’t know how to talk about the silk or the wool business, or about profits and losses, I have to talk about the government, and I must either make a vow of silence or discuss that.’5 Fortunately he did not remain silent. Thomas More may have made his single foray into political theory as


a consequence of his uneasiness over Henry VIII’s despotic style in Tournai, writing his two warnings of the dangers of tyranny, the unpublished and incomplete History of Richard III of about 1513, and then the masterful Utopia of 1516. With its opposition to democracy, emphasis on the fickleness of the populace, realistic portrayal of human behaviour without the over-awing power of government, the publication by Hobbes in 1629 of his translation of the History of Thucydides, ‘the most Politick Historiographer that ever writ’, may well have been the intellectual turning point of his life.6 Hobbes apparently decided on the publication in order to counter the Petition of Right of the previous year, a constitutional landmark asserting the power of parliament against the royal prerogative on matters of taxation, imprisonment, and martial law. To Hobbes this must have been a clear incitement to the anarchy so graphically depicted by Thucydides. Hobbes’s discovery of Euclid and Galileo in the thirties enabled him to elaborate a fully developed ‘scientific’ treatment of his original position. Locke’s friendship with Shaftesbury seems to have fired his advocacy of toleration, liberty, constitutionalism, and opposition to tyranny, and certainly under his patron’s auspices, an early draft of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was finished, as were the first versions of the Two Treatises. Not to be overlooked are other basic beliefs and attitudes, often although not always in the form of unexpressed assumptions. Theorists may see no reason to be explicit or precise about them, although they were not always taken for granted. Why should theorists be explicit about convictions shared with most of their readers? Most theorists and their audience prior to the modern epoch accepted as natural or God given the fundamental social division entailed by the state, between rulers and ruled, rich and poor, leisured and labouring, and dominant men and subordinate women. Not that they failed to recognize or deliberately concealed what we have previously termed the very essence of the state, but they often accepted it as the way of things since time immemorial and were apparently convinced that it was eternal, an inevitable and changeless condition of humanity. With some exceptions before the nineteenth century – Plato, More, Winstanley, Rousseau, the French Utopians, Paine, Babeuf – theorists did not question or discuss the essence of the state and its social divisions, much less disputing the


inegalitarianism embedded in its very nature. Most theorists seemed to accept on faith and without hesitation, reflection, or reservation that most mortals were ordained to serve and obey, while a few were meant to be served and to command. Likewise, the age-old social division between the rich minority and the poor majority has usually passed without question or demur as inevitable, an unchangeable part of the natural order of things. The problem for us is to recognize these attitudes. All theorists, of course, were vitally concerned with how the injustices of government and its actions (as each perceived them) might be corrected. This was the raison d’être of their speculative endeavours. Related to these generally unexamined convictions was the prevailing notion of the gentleman and gentlemanly behaviour in contrast to lesser mortals and their activity. Although the ideal of the gentleman might change over the ages, there seemed to be common agreement that he is a person of good family, landed property, and education, identified by a decorous style of conduct, by nobility, courage, and magnanimity. The hallmark of the gentleman was that he was not compelled to labour physically to support himself and his family in accordance with their station. While he engaged in mental labour in the pursuit of his legitimate callings (estate management, warfare, politics, law, philosophy, literature), the vast majority who must rely on the labour of their hands existed to obey his every beck and call. Physical labour, disdained by the gentleman as demeaning and loathsome, was appropriate only for the ‘vulgar’, the ‘herd’, hoi polloi, ‘shit’, ‘rabble’, ‘rag-tag people’, ‘many-headed hydra’, ‘multitude’, ‘canaille’, as they were variously stigmatized throughout history by their gentlemanly superiors and supervisors. Rarely does the theorist acknowledge that without the majority’s labour and hardship, and valiance in battle, there would be no gentlemen. ‘Masters’ and ‘servants’, as Locke so clearly recognized, were statuses as old as history, accepted by most theorists prior to the nineteenth century. Peasants are usually given short shrift, if they are mentioned at all. The reader gets little inkling from the accounts of most theorists that peasants were indispensable actors on the historical scene, created by the state and rendering its continuing existence possible.7 Usually the sole concession made to workers in general were recommendations assuring that they would be pliant, disciplined, and content, and above all prohibiting them from any but a nominal part in the


political arena. One can only conclude that much of political theory was written by gentlemen, for gentlemen, about the proper political activity of gentlemen. Since the political sphere was universally deemed to be a gentlemen’s world, why should the theorist call attention to what everyone understood? If the labouring masses were assumed by most theorists and their gentlemanly readers to be beyond the pale, a necessary evil not worthy of discussion, women of all classes fare even worse. Until the enlightened attitudes of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century thinkers like Helvétius, Condorcet, and Godwin, which culminated in J. S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), women were thought to be physically and mentally inferior to men. Women were given the stereotyped description of timidity, fickleness, and unreliability. They were, admittedly, absolutely necessary for the propagation of the species, the satisfaction of male sexuality, and household work and management, but however necessary, women were destined to be the instruments and help-mates of men, ever obedient, dutiful, and supportive. In a male world, woman’s allotted role in the scheme of things was in the family, procreating, caring for the needs of children and husbands, with no function outside the lower-class household than labouring, generally in the most menial occupations, for her superiors. Upper-class women, the wives and daughters of gentlemen, relieved by servants of household labours, were inside and outside its confines expected to be attractive ornaments: elegant conversationalists, gracious hostesses, accomplished entertainers, congenial companions, and seductive playthings. Naturally they were also intended to be good and loving wives and mothers and clever managers of household and servants. Nor should a crucial historic function of upper-class women be overlooked, that of maintaining dynastic relationships, and forging new alliances through marriage. Even from the most advanced pre-nineteenth-century perspective, a woman of quality might legitimately engage in literary pursuits, painting, music, and dancing, and hold serious intellectual debate with men, but no woman of any class (any more than a labouring male) should actively participate directly in politics or pursue any of the manly occupations and professions. This was the common view despite the fact that several exceptionally talented and able women like Elizabeth I of England were the reigning queens of their countries.


Women of every class, no less than the labouring male majority, have been crucial to the survival of the state, yet from the standpoint of political theory until recently, their vital role has not been even tacitly acknowledged. The human subjects of the theorists’ reflections on state and politics have been usually limited to first-class citizens, males of gentlemanly status, and have excluded all women and labouring men. A minuscule minority, hence, perhaps not much more on the average than ten percent or less of the total adult population of the state, has been the real focus of attention of most past political theory. The others might just as well never have existed, except for the indisputable reality that their labours were largely responsible for the state, the central concern of political theory. So the ignoring and thus discounting of their critical function by the theorists, seems to be one of the cruel intellectual paradoxes of our civilization. In addition to relegating labouring men and women to an almost subhuman status, many political theorists accept the enslavement of both sexes in their societies. Plato and Cicero took slavery for granted; and Aristotle justified the existence of the slave as a rationally and even physically inferior being, a form of animate property to be used by the naturally superior. St Augustine and St Thomas acknowledged slavery without protest as an established convention of civilized life. Even More’s Utopian ideal is blemished by the institution of slavery. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries slavery was criticized by a few theorists, Bodin and the Levellers, for example, but they were a distinct minority. Slavery was taken as a matter of course in the influential treatises on international law of Suarez and Grotius. Locke justified slavery as equitable treatment of prisoners captured in just wars, and invested in the African slave trade. Not until the European Enlightenment did theorists almost universally and forthrightly condemn slavery, although in North America prominent thinkers like John Adams, Jefferson, and the Federalists were not among them. Another generative element closely connected with the others is the theorist’s social ideal of ‘hero’ and ‘anti-hero’. Less obvious in some theorists than in others because of a lack of systematic presentation, the ideal may have to be reconstructed from the texts by the reader. Linked to his fundamental political commitment, his partisanship, class attitudes, and gender prejudices is some vision of what


it means to be fully human. How would the theorist prefer human beings to live and act? What human types and conduct does he condemn? What kind of human should dominate society and govern the state? Who in society as it was then constituted was most capable of realizing the ideal? Is the ideal attainable by everyone or only a few? Is the gap wide or narrow between the social ideal and existing individuals and social classes? Under what social and political conditions can the human ideal be most effectively realized? The notion of the human ideal should not be confused with a conception of human nature, although the two are obviously related because the theorist, in postulating what humans are capable of becoming, is also making certain assumptions about their essence. The theorist’s ideal, however, implies a social ethic and a political context most conducive to the fashioning and flourishing of such an individual. A classic political theory can be thought of as a translation of a human ideal – often in the form of a vaguely articulated set of basic attitudes – into concrete social and political prescriptions. Needless to say, the social hero of the political theorist was invariably male, never a heroine, and this is true even of the enlightened J. S. Mill. Plato and Aristotle offered their readers an aristocratic human ideal. Its model and source are Greek gentlemen of noble birth, landed wealth, leisure, culture, and refinement. While Plato, at least in The Republic, transmuted the aristocratic raw material into a philosopher–warrior, Aristotle’s ideal of the great-souled man delineated in the Nicomachean Ethics is perhaps closer to the actual historical social type. Both thinkers were of aristocratic stock, writing when their class in Greece was degenerating and declining as a vigorous social and political force, giving way to the rise of the common people, to democracy and democratic values. They believed that their cherished way of life and culture could only be saved and strengthened by remaking the aristocracy and its return to political supremacy in order to prevent ‘lawless’ levelling and the tyranny of the mob. In holding forth to their readers an aristocratic human ideal derived from but by no means identical with the traditional Greek nobility, Plato and Aristotle contrasted their hero to an anti-hero, hoi polloi, the ill-born and poor working in banausic vocations: artisans, tradesmen, and labourers. For the two philosophers these were the crude, vulgar, and brazen members of the demos, who could never attain true happiness and having come to power in


Athens and elsewhere threatened the aristocratic way of life and culture itself. The aristocratic ideal of Plato and Aristotle was modified in some interesting ways in the many centuries separating Greek antiquity from early modern Europe: for example in Cicero’s ‘optimates’ and St Augustine’s idolized ascetic, noble, cultured Christianized Senators like Paulinus of Nola. St Thomas’ fondness for medieval town and city and praise of free independent guildsmen and moderate mercantile activity, seem to have been the beginning in political theory of the erosion of the ancient human ideal and the harbinger of something new. As European society in the late middle ages was changing, so was the human ideal cherished by previous theorists to undergo alteration. Machiavelli, for instance, explicitly rejected the landed aristocrat as a model, instead finding his hero in an idealized version of a member of the middling rural and urban propertied classes: peasant, artisan, shopkeeper, and professional. The ideal underpinning More’s Utopia is the person of proven intellect – a variant of Plato’s philosopher–king – dedicating his life to the pursuit of knowledge and entrusted by the ruled to govern for the common good. Hobbes’s ideal, unlike that of Machiavelli and of More, was not far removed from the aristocratic hero of classical antiquity: courageous, generous, and great-souled. But in witnessing the English revolution, Hobbes, frightened by the activities and attitudes of preachers, parliamentarians, city merchants, and rising men of trade, and thinking that their behaviour was coming to typify most of mankind, placed his antihero at the centre of his speculations, keeping off stage his hero whom he realistically perceived to be a rare exception. Locke’s human ideal was something of a break-through. He was less brutally egoistical and power-seeking than Hobbes’s anti-hero, but a hero with some of the character of acquisitive man; yet prudent enough to live securely and peacefully in a society of liberty and toleration. Differing from his predecessors, Locke gave his hero a novel dimension. The new hero was homo faber, the creator of things with his own labour or the contracted labour of others. He was the practical minded, inventive person who took pains to understand, excel, and advance in his calling, no matter how humble, living within his means – industrious, frugal, thrifty, sober, honest, and God-fearing. Above all, he was the ‘self-directed’ individual, guided by reason


in defiance of custom, fashion, received opinion, and traditional authority. Locke was usually thinking of the civic spirited and culturally enlightened gentleman in agriculture, commerce, or the professions. Nevertheless, he also greatly admired the self-made man of lowly origins, and even had a good word for the manual worker of initiative and perseverance. His anti-hero assumed a number of guises: the labourer, deficient in enterprise and application; the person of means, wasting his leisure and legacy in frivolous pleasure; and in the intellectual world, word spinners and logic-choppers, lacking in common sense. As we move closer to the present, the theorist’s ideal in some cases proves to be a variation of Locke’s, even turning it inside out. Rousseau’s hero is the little man, everywhere in his opinion victimized by the despotism of society and government. He is most typically the peasant, untouched by the corrupting influence of decadent urban culture, the small independent self-sufficient farmer of the Swiss mountain cantons or Corsican backwoods, who lives simply and frugally, works diligently, shows considerable mechanical ingenuity and artistic skill, and is open, honest, and forthright in his dealings with others. So in this brief catalogue to the nineteenth century and Marx. He was fascinated by his anti-hero, the bourgeois who from his own bourgeois perspective was indeed a kind of hero. However, he idealized the industrial worker, the proletarian creator and fabricator. For Marx, the human ideal, within the reach of everyone, consisted of the realization of the physical and mental potential of all individuals and the fulfilment of their creative powers within a radically transformed social context that would end human alienation and exploitation. Marx’s ideal existed in contrast to that of his contemporary J. S. Mill, whose own hero seems to have been people like himself and his circle of friends, who were dissatisfied Socrates rather than satisfied pigs. Mill rejected the bigotry and intolerance of the ascendant middle class and its ‘collective mediocrity’; and was fearful of the growing working class, who he believed had turned from ‘servility’ to ‘insolence’ under the influence of egalitarian ideals. Against the outlook of the middle and lower classes, he upheld the wise, noble, moderate, discriminating, and tasteful among his kind of individual, recommending the rule of the opinion of this ‘exceptional few’ who would be able to guide the ‘sovereign many’ toward


identifying their happiness with the happiness of the whole, and desiring what is desirable as defined by his heroes. From this résumé it should be clear that the driving force of political theories, the passions and attitudes of the theorists, usually below the surface of their thought and seldom explicitly articulated, are a determining influence on the substance of their reflections. Or to change the metaphor, perhaps one should say that much of the shape and form of the theorist’s intellectual architecture results from an ideological infrastructure joining together a profound political and social commitment; an attitude toward the nature of the state and its basic social divisions; beliefs about class, status, labour, and gender; and an ideal of the distinctively human being. Without such a composite ideological infrastructure, there would be no political theory, no fully fashioned edifice of ideas.

3.3 The prescriptive dimension From the less discernible generative dimension of a political theory, we must now move to the much more visible structure, from the framework to the completed building itself, to its bricks and mortar. The most obvious and essential feature of any political theory is its portrayal of the state, not necessarily the existing state, but the state as the theorist would wish to see it, the just state. Because the theorist is first and foremost ‘a Reformer of Politicks’, the state of his theory embodies recommendations for change. This is the most obvious characteristic of a political theory which first impresses anyone who has perused Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, or Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. A set of prescriptions for the structure of the just state, and consequently proposals for the reform of the existing state are essential to every political theory. Because the theorists’ prescriptions stem from differing perceptions of the injustices of the state and society in which they live, for example Winstanley and Locke, or Rousseau and Burke, different schemes whereby those injustices can be corrected are accordingly offered to their audiences. We are confronted, therefore, with a dazzling diversity of reforming projects for the state. Theorists like Cicero, Bodin, Locke, Hume, and Burke wish to safeguard the current political order by the modest alteration and bolstering of some of its institutional arrangements.


St Augustine, much more theologian than political theorist, while recognizing the deficiencies of the Roman imperial order, embraces it, thinking that Christianity would be the necessary ideological buttress of the regime, thereby supplying unity and harmony. He is followed in this respect by Luther’s reflections on monarchy, although Calvin supported and inspired the Genevan republic of virtue. Other theorists thought that more far-reaching reforms were demanded, for example, Aristotle, St Thomas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Hegel. Still others believed that the only hope for the state and the correction of its injustices was a radical reconstruction and creation of a new just order. They called for wiping the canvas clean and beginning afresh as did Plato, More, Winstanley, Harrington, Rousseau, the French Utopians, Paine, Babeuf, and Marx. Harrington’s blueprint built upon the English republican commonwealth under Cromwell; and although Rousseau never worked out a single plan for the just state, his recommendations for a Corsican constitution and suggestions in The Social Contract indicate what it might have been. Readers, however, must take care not to misread the intentions of several of the more radical reformers, even of Hobbes’s far less utopian theory of the state. On the face of it, there seems little doubt that Winstanley, Harrington, and the French Utopians took their respective recommendations seriously for what they appeared to be: the reconstruction of the existing state and its transformation into a benign polity. Rousseau may have longed for a republic of equals, but he was the first to admit in his proposals for Poland that different cultures and circumstances of peoples inhibited sudden sweeping changes and the imposition of a uniform project of reform. Always wary of utopianism, but increasingly revolutionary, Marx likewise was hesitant to work out the specifics of a reforming scheme for the state. The state, indeed, in its present form, he thought, would eventually wither away with the socialist triumph over capitalism. While he was sympathetic to the political structure of the Paris Commune of 1871, he insisted that socialists should concentrate their energies on the first item of their agenda: the overthrow of capitalism and the abolition of wage slavery and the exploitation of human beings. The cases of Plato and More, and also Hobbes – certainly not a radical reformer – are somewhat different. In The Republic Plato seems to accept that Kallipolis will probably never see the light of day and in


the Laws presents a project for the best practicable state of Magnesia. More and Hobbes also expressed doubts about the realization of their political prescriptions. If these thinkers, however, acknowledged the impracticality of their proposals, then what were their considerable efforts all about? Arguably, the ideal states of Plato and More (and Hobbes) were not meant to be literal designs for the radical reconstruction of existing society. Instead, they functioned as models, ideal types, or philosophic fictions whose purpose was to formulate and propound the fundamental principles that should inform any actual attempt to alter politics and society. Rather than templates for political recreation and renovation, the model was conceived of as a fairly flexible normative guide for a programme of practical political reform, both in respect to ends and means. Behind and beyond Plato’s best practicable Magnesian constitution, regardless of the many differences from Kallipolis, were the informing and guiding principles of the latter. More, recognizing the fruitlessness of attempting to institute Utopian communism in England and on the Continent, at the same time seems to have believed that his recommendations strikingly illustrated the necessity of reform if political and social order were to be restored. Moderate, not sweeping changes, inspired by the Utopian model, might very well help to resolve the troubles plaguing Western Europe: the reduction of the gulf separating the rich few from the impoverished many, the prevention of tyranny through some form of mixed constitution with a system of checks and balances, and the replacement of wealth by merit in the selection of public officials. Hobbes’s Leviathan might never be actually replicated, nevertheless every precaution should be taken through prudent measures to strengthen the sovereign power and to ensure ideological control of opinion leaders and populace along the lines argued in his masterpiece. Indeed, it may be true of all political theorists, even those of lesser utopian persuasion like Cicero and Locke, that their proposals were not so much to be taken literally as to be advisory models for showing the way to reform, and giving the reasons for the stipulated reform. In whatever way the theorist wishes to refurbish the historical state, his theory gives form and substance to a vision of a wellordered and just political society. The ideal, however postulated by the theorist, is the standard, the norm by which the blemishes and defects of actual state and government are identified, compared, and


assessed, the calculus for estimating appropriate remedial measures. Encapsulating the theorist’s notion of who should rule and how rule should best be exercised, the ideal is presented as therapy for the political and social ills of the age. The ideal, Plato’s Kallipolis and More’s Utopia as well as the much more moderate proposals of Hume and Burke, is the intellectual device for giving concrete shape to the theorist’s generative values and beliefs. Political theorists were not the starry eyed dreamers or ivory tower speculators sometimes portrayed. Quite the contrary, they were in the main perspicacious realists, keenly aware of the gap between ideal and reality, versed in the art of the possible, and fully cognizant of the fact that any actual political and social reforms would fall short of their prescriptions, no matter how moderate or piece-meal they might be. As consummate reformers of politics, they usually laboured under few illusions about how their recommendations would be received and acted upon. Yet from the time of Greek antiquity, they have persisted in their prescriptive endeavours, hoping that the actors in the political arena would heed at least in some small way their admonitions and advice for improving political society. One important and sometimes over-looked feature of the prescriptive component is that the theorists’ political recommendations, their ideal states, J. S. Mill’s modest project for reform as well as Plato’s Kallipolis, are valuable historical documents, telling us much about the actual state of the period. Like all such documents, however, they must be treated with caution by the analyst, for their evidence of historical reality may be skewed by the theorist’s prejudices and biases, by the generative impulses of theorizing. When used, however, in conjunction with other evidence, the theorist’s prescriptive state is in many cases illuminating. Despite its utopian features Plato’s Republic and the more practicable venture of the Laws reflect the ancient Greek experience with the polis; and Hobbes’s Leviathan yields important clues about the nature of existing parliamentary monarchy. Less extreme prescriptive formulations like Cicero’s and Locke’s may be closer to historical reality. Not only the prescriptive dimension itself, but also associated references to and discussions of existing institutions and practices, can provide insight and information about the existing state. Aristotle’s Politics and Machiavelli’s Prince and Discourses are gold mines of such data, as are the relevant works of Adam Smith and Hegel.


In a sense, therefore, political theorists are historians of the state, not simply historians of ideas about the state. If their theories of the state enhance our understanding of the past, their perceptions of the existing state were more often than not from the standpoint of the ruling classes of which they were usually members or clients, a relationship becoming somewhat more tenuous in the modern age. From our perspective of documenting the past, consequently, these theorists qua historians, could most aptly be described as writing ‘history from above’ in contrast to ‘history from below’. Examining and discussing the operation of the historical state from the viewpoint of the ruling class means, among other things, that the labouring majority upon which the well-being of the state so depends – for example, the peasantry in a pre-industrial state – remains a cipher in their expositions, except for advocating means of guaranteeing their political passivity, compliance, and productivity. The first states brought the peasantry into being, and without them could not have survived. The peasantry, despite their essential contribution to the existence and welfare of the state are given scant attention by political theorists from Plato to Hobbes. If peasants in particular and labourers in general are discussed at all, it is never in detail, usually abstractly and in passing, frequently as subjects of criticism and scorn and objects of fear. As one might naturally expect with history from above, the focus is always on the chief political actors and their offices, upon those individuals and institutions possessing power within the state and much less so on those over whom power is exercised. From the opening of the early modern period indications of a change of perspective appear. There were, however, some faint signs before in John of Salisbury’s discussion of peasants and artisans in his version of the organic metaphor of the state, and in Marsiglio’s inclusion of ‘mechanics’ as members of his active, participatory citizen body. The history from above of the political theorists really begins in early modern Europe to be supplemented but certainly not displaced by history from below. This is perhaps due in part to the fact that some of the theorists were themselves of lowly origins with firsthand experience of physical labour, poverty, and hardship. The newly emerging tendency possibly commences with Machiavelli, perhaps with More in Utopia, and certainly later with the bitter social and political criticism of the Commonwealthmen of mid-sixteenth


century England. Certainly Winstanley, Rousseau, Paine, Babeuf, and Marx commence to redress the balance by viewing the state as perceived by those who feel and bear the full weight of its coercive power, who have suffered enormously for the sake of its survival, and have been systematically excluded from any meaningful role in its political affairs. Although with the development of socialism the process continued, the mainstream of political theory continued to be from the vantage of the ruling classes.

3.4 The persuasive dimension As dedicated reformers of politics, political theorists must convince their readers of the verisimilitude of their prescriptions for a wellordered state. A set of recommendations itself is not enough unless the audience is swayed to believe that it is indeed a means of resolving the urgent practical political and social problems of the day. The jewel of the theory – a prescription for the state – must be provided with an attractive setting by the theorist, embellishing it and enhancing its appeal. With this aim in mind the theorist resorts to numerous linguistic and rhetorical devices to render the argumentation as persuasive as possible, appealing to the emotions of readers, and to ensure a favourable reception. Historical evidence is carefully selected, and illustrations and examples chosen to bolster the brief. Passages from the Bible and quotations from highly respected classics are artfully deployed to give pronouncements an air of authority. Theorists wrote with passion and feeling, hoping to convey something of them to their readers. Some were accomplished literary craftsmen who had a way with words and left a legacy of trenchant remarks and memorable aphorisms. Thoughts may be so organized as to appear in the image of a familiar literary genre, only to subvert it, as Machiavelli did in The Prince in respect to the time-hallowed mirror-of-princes tradition, even furnishing the book written in the vernacular with Latin chapter titles. Or the theorist may purloin and adapt for his own purposes the conceptual language of his opponents as Hobbes did with the natural law and natural rights formulations of the Levellers with the intention of undermining them. Locke employed the language of the agrarian reformers of the period in chapter five, ‘Of Property’, of the Second Treatise to make a case for agricultural


improvement, enclosure, and industrious labour; and Rousseau appropriated from a venerable French tradition of thought the concepts of general will and common good and democratized them.8 Issue may be taken with popular or respected authors for the purpose of establishing the theorists’ own credentials and underscoring the novelty and even daring quality of their own reflections. So Aristotle disputes with Plato on a number of important points; St Augustine argues against Cicero; Hobbes against Aristotle; Locke against Filmer; Rousseau against Hobbes and Locke; Paine against Burke, who in turn lambasts Rousseau; and Marx against Hegel. This particular polemical stance, however, is not simply for the sake of its persuasive power. It is also a means through which fundamentals are defined. Political theorists are in a significant sense self-appointed teachers, who take their educational function very seriously, and the readers are thought of as their pupils learning the lessons to guide them through contemporary political troubles. Theorists assume a didactic role in their briefs, hoping to teach the audience that the remedies offered, if only imbibed, will relieve the current situation. The theorist has in effect framed a ‘course of studies’ for readers. Plato’s Republic may have been first read to assembled students of the Academy, gathered from the far-flung reaches of the Mediterranean, who would eventually return to their native lands, in some instances to gain political power. Cicero penned De officiis for the edification of his wayward son, a book probably to become the most widely studied secular work in early modern Western Europe. The Policraticus of John of Salisbury was inscribed to his friend St Thomas Becket possibly for consolation in his fatal struggle with Henry II. At the behest of Dominican friends, Thomas Aquinas composed De Regno for the King of Cyprus to put him on the path of true royal conduct. Marsiglio of Padua dedicated Defensor Pacis to Ludwig of Bavaria, perhaps for the future guidance of his patron. Machiavelli was particularly keen that the message of The Prince reach those who aspired to power, and possibly those who wished to subvert the power of rulers. Hobbes believed that Leviathan had taught many young English gentlemen the nature of their civic duty. Locke wrote both the Two Treatises and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding for practical minded, commonsensical people of his own kind; Burke, to pinpoint and warn of the menace of the French revolutionaries;


Paine, to inspire and mobilize lower-class opponents of the status quo; Hegel, at least in the opinion of some, to sustain German liberalism; Tocqueville, to assess the attributes and shortcomings of fledgling American democracy for the benefit of post-revolutionary French citizens; Marx and Engels, to promote the overthrow of capitalism. Each theorist in his own way was a teacher, and more than a teacher, a prophet of what things could be like, if only the reader would take to heart the lesson and act in accordance with it in the political arena. But all of this is not enough. An appeal to the sentiments, feelings, and passions of readers through rhetorical device, literary ornament and style, and a didactic mode of discourse scarcely exhaust the persuasive component of political theory or do it justice. If the primary intention of the theorist is to impel readers to take a particular path of action, how is political theory of the classic variety to be distinguished from ideology or even propaganda? Moreover, as we have seen, there is a significant ideological dimension consisting of the theorists’ basic political commitment, many of their social beliefs and values, and their notion of the human ideal. Is there no fundamental difference between Mein Kampf and Leviathan? Both books play upon the sensibilities of readers, their hopes and fears, their desires to learn what is basically wrong with the current political and social situation, to identify the villains and culprits, and to right the wrongs incurred. Since the authors of both Mein Kampf and Leviathan wish to move their readers to change existing conditions, it is arguable that the ideological element of each is extremely large. Are we then forced to conclude that political theories are little more than ideologies, cleverly constructed to promote the interests and advance the well-being of a particular social group or class? Certainly, every political theory possesses an important ideological ingredient, but is this all there is to it? Is the chief difference between Mein Kampf and Leviathan solely one of ideological degree, the crudity and banality of the one versus the refinement, intellectual sophistication, rationality, and quest for truth of the other? These vital questions (further explored in Chapter 6) bring us to the central characteristic of the persuasive component of political theory, that of intellectual justification. The political theorist may hope to attract the attention of readers by his literary art and ingenuity and through emotional and sentimental appeal, but he is not


to be dismissed as a mere propagandist or ideologist. A political theory is not a proposal for a ‘quick fix’, nor a patent remedy or a quack’s nostrum, nor a promise of manna from heaven. The posture of the theorist, notwithstanding a consuming passion for change, is more detached and circumspect, normally cool and calm in appraisal and analysis. Political theory is a quest for truth, motivated by a love of wisdom, philosophia. The political theorist is a lover of truth, whether he is in the mould of the philosopher Hobbes or the historian Polybius, a seeker after truth, misguided as a specific undertaking in this direction may seem to us. Philosophers are not alone in being dedicated to the search for truth. In the attempt to discover the truth about political arrangements and to convince others of how they should be altered, in terms of who should rule and the appropriate exercise of rule, the theorist must appeal ultimately to the rationality, not the irrationality of the audience. They are literate, educated (and self-educated) individuals who read the work for the sake of self-improvement, intellectual stimulus and orientation, and with a growing conviction that something must be done to correct existing social and political injustices. Political theorists, therefore, to attract their readers, to persuade them to act in the appropriate manner, must appeal to their reason by constructing a rational, coherent argument that enlightens their intellects and convinces them of the truth. The political theorist, as a seeker after truth, passionately committed to the prescription being offered, must through a reasoning process persuade readers that the approach adopted is neither arbitrary nor whimsical, nor purely emotional outpouring; neither a paean to class or racial hatred, nor the sole result of personal intuition, revelation, or mystical experience. Neither propagandists nor ideologues, although often sharing in their style of discourse, political theorists must engage in rationally cogent lines of argument on which they ground their political prescriptions, arguments aimed at the intellects of readers, not simply at their emotions and irrational feelings, not simply to reinforce their ingrained prejudices, and loves and hates. Intellectual justification, so central to the persuasive dimension of political theory differentiates it on the one hand from propaganda and ideology, and on the other hand from journalism and policy memoranda. Political theory seen in retrospect has generally been a voice of reason and the reasonable in politics, sometimes


the sole voice in the arena of activity and utterance notable for its irrationality in the form of deceit, fraud, violence, narrow pursuit of self-interest, and ideological sham and deception. Political theorists resort to a variety of intellectual justifications to strengthen and support their recommendations, to provide them with the aura of rational authority and intellectual legitimacy. They singly and in combination marshal buttressing arguments from theology and ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, psychology and anthropology, from science, history, and practical experience. The degree of complexity of the justificatory apparatus of argumentation is proportionate to the theorist’s deployment of a variety of these intellectual pillars. This accounts for a major difference between a philosophic and non-philosophic mode of theorizing. Philosophic political theorists like Plato, Hobbes, and Hegel rely far more on an elaborate and involved justificatory apparatus than non-philosophic theorists like Machiavelli, Harrington, Rousseau, and Burke. The former erect an imposing edifice of closely articulated ideas and concepts from which their political prescriptions are seemingly derived, while the latter appear more straightforward in their projects, emphasizing experience, historical change and development. The beginnings of the justificatory labours of political theory are in Plato’s Republic with its intricate amalgam of metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, and ethics yielding and substantiating his vision of Kallipolis; and Aristotle considerably alters this melange as the intellectual foundation of his best practicable polity. St Augustine relies mainly on theology, and St Thomas welds together Aristotelianism and Christianity to bear the intellectual weight of his recommendations. Hobbes fashions an architectonic structure of intimately related ideas that endow his advocacy of supreme sovereign power with rational authenticity. At least in the Two Treatises, Locke formulates a doctrine of individual natural rights based on Christian natural law and a novel stress on labour, coupling it with shrewd practical perception to provide the basis for an ideal of responsible constitutional government. Rousseau forges a primitive anthropology and developmental social psychology in the Second Discourse – largely the product of a fertile and illuminating imagination – to justify in part his later espousal of democracy and social equality. Burke’s interpretation of the organic growth of the English constitution with its venerable customs and traditions is the


authoritative grounding of his opposition to sweeping reform and radical political change. Marx synthesizes Hegelian philosophy, the principles of British political economy, and the tenets of French socialism, combined with an acute perception of historical process and a sensitivity to contemporary social history, to fashion a novel system of ideas from which his political prescriptions emanate. An integral and significant part of the justificatory efforts of political theorists is a conception of human nature, in some instances systematically developed, in others, vague and imprecisely formulated. The former theorists work out a rudimentary psychology and anthropology, while the latter often without detailed discussion make reference to and accept the Christian doctrine of original sin, or some modified, secular version of it. The conceptions may entail a static, innate nature, egoistic and self-seeking as in Machiavelli and Hobbes; or at the other extreme, a perception of inherent human altruism and cooperation, an idea typifying the anarchists. An open-ended conception may be adopted, that humans, neither intrinsically good nor evil, are what they are because of the social context, a common precept of the Enlightenment, most notably held by Rousseau and the utopian socialists. Elaborating on Rousseau’s insight that humans have a history, Marx thinks that they are basically purposeful, socially labouring creatures. The linkage of a conception of human nature with the theorist’s political prescriptions is familiar terrain. If humans are fundamentally egoists and self-seekers, then the state must be so organized as to impede and contain these socially destructive proclivities. On the other hand, if humans are innately altruistic and cooperative, society must be arranged to enable them best to realize their natures, which means, for the anarchists, the abolition of the state. However, if humans innately are neither bad nor good, but the historical products of their respective societies, a conviction held by Rousseau, the utopian socialists, and Marx, then what they can become depends essentially upon restructuring the social environment. The role of the social context in connection with a conception of human nature raises the further crucial question of social environmentalism and human malleability in political theory. The different forms taken by the doctrine of social environmentalism, particularly prominent during the Enlightenment, are variations on the wellworn notion of the malleability of human nature characterizing


much of the thought of classical antiquity and continued by Renaissance figures like Machiavelli, More, Hooker, and Bacon. If humans are partially plastic and each person’s outlook and conduct result to some extent from upbringing, example, schooling, associations, and circumstances, it follows that the human make-up can be shaped, at least to a point, by action upon the social environment. The malleability of humans means that they are improvable. To make happy, virtuous, and cooperative individuals dedicated to the common good, the social context must be rendered conducive to such ends. Social, political, and legal institutions and arrangements can be positive instruments in fashioning the human raw stuff according to some ideal model, either by gradual alteration and reform or by the radical reconstruction of society and state. Socially subversive behaviour, delinquency, and crime, or so it is maintained, can be appreciably reduced by refurbishing the institutional and legal setting. Depending upon the degree of malleability assigned to human nature, social improvement is a distinct possibility. When given a chronological emphasis, the doctrine of social environmentalism during and after the Enlightenment is transformed into several brands of historicism, often with an incremental theory of human development entailing a pattern of the progressive interaction of individual and society, both changing in a dialectical process. We create and recreate ourselves by altering our social environment. In discussing the doctrine of social environmentalism and the question of human malleability in political theory, care must be taken to avoid placing proponents of the doctrine in opposition to theorists with a static notion of a fixed human nature. Often the two categories seem to be identical. Indeed, it is arguable that all political theorists, regardless of their varying conceptions of human nature, have been social environmentalists, albeit in different degrees and with different emphases. Theorists such as Plato in the Laws, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, with their gloomy insistence upon the universal selfishness and power-seeking propensities of humans, nevertheless thought that they can be rendered social by upbringing and education within a context rendered possible by a well-ordered state. Likewise More and Hooker, both of whom subscribed to the teaching of original sin, can be called social environmentalists. Again Locke, who also may have believed in original sin, sired the modern conception of social environmentalism with the notion of tabula rasa in


An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, recognizing certain mental faculties, however, as innate, and elsewhere giving some weight to genetic factors. The extreme social environmentalist, Helvétius, who reduced Locke’s psychology to pure sensation – even so regarding mental powers and faculties – at the same time held the idea of a selfinterested human nature. In each of these cases, however, the proper political organization and manipulation of the social environment was thought to be the way by which humans might overcome – at least in part – their inborn anti-social proclivities, allowing them to live in relative peace and harmony. So doctrines of social environmentalism are not necessarily monopolized by theorists holding an open-ended conception of human nature like Rousseau and Marx, but in some forms may very well be the indispensable auxiliary of theorists with a view of inherent human egoism. The contention that all political theorists to some extent have been social environmentalists rests in part on a distinction between human nature and human behaviour. While for some theorists – Plato, More, Locke, Hobbes – the inherent nature of humans cannot be altered, nevertheless their behaviour is susceptible to moulding. Beyond this perception, however, was the notion, developing during the Enlightenment, that certain qualities in the human makeup are historically determined. Since these qualities result from the historical process of changing social arrangements, we can modify the former by transforming the latter. This insight formed the basis of wide sweeping and radical social criticism – for example in respect to private property and property relations – so characteristic of the Enlightenment and of later liberal and socialist thought. Some isolated instances of this kind of social critique had previously existed, in Plato and More for instance, but only when full consciousness of history as process and its effects on social institutions had been attained, did it become a relatively common outlook. Important as the justificatory element of the persuasive component of political theory is, we should be very cautious about concluding that theorists, from the standpoint of the psychology of their creative activities, begin with a justificatory apparatus, and then derive sets of political prescriptions from it. In actuality, almost the exact opposite seems likely. The genesis of a political theory, as we have seen, fundamentally ideological in an initial passionate political commitment and set of social attitudes, appears to be later


systematically shaped by intensive intellectual effort. The justificatory component is apparently a function of the original political vision and social attitudes. It is almost as if the theorist says to himself before commencing the project, if this is what I genuinely desire, how do I devise a persuasive intellectual warranty for its systematic elaboration. A conception of human nature, for example, is certainly analytically but perhaps not temporally prior to the theorist’s political prescription. In actuality, far from logically deducing a political prescription from a notion of human nature, the theorist may commonly develop the notion only after furnishing a detailed prescription of the well-ordered state, the one constructed to fit the other, to provide the other with an authoritative intellectual grounding. Such also seems to be true of the relationship of other justificatory elements to the political prescription. Theorists wish to recommend particular kinds of states and institutional arrangements in place of the existing ones. Therefore, in order to provide as convincing a rational argument as possible for their positions, they seek the intellectual imprimatur of theology, history, science, or an ingenious structure of metaphysical and epistemological ideas, or some combination of them. Of course, it is arguable that some sort of incipient justificatory apparatus is part of the original energizing political commitment. This may well be true, but the full articulation of the justification seems to follow the prescription, although proof of any of this is virtually impossible. Here then is my impression of the character of political theory and why it constitutes a unique mode of discourse. Reference to its three dimensions – generative, prescriptive, and persuasive – may be of help in grasping how political theory is the rational transformation of ideological elements – heart-felt political and social commitments – into a conception of state and government, intended to induce readers, by appealing to their emotions and especially their intellects, to act upon its recommendations in the public forum. The composition of a political theory is a supreme act of intellectual creativity, falling short perhaps of innovative scientific and mathematical invention. Nonetheless, one is bound to ask the question to which there is no answer: what would the world have been like without the creativity of the classic political theorists? Neither poetry, nor propaganda, nor ideology, although it partakes of all three, theory has been a powerful voice of reason in the political activity of mankind.

4 Conditions Favouring Political Theory

Defining the nature of political theory raises the question of the social and cultural circumstances most conducive to its flowering. Why has creative political theory of the highest order occurred in some periods and places and not in others? What have been the conditions in which it has thrived and those most inimical to its development? A number of factors may be relevant. Political theory appears to have flourished in times of acute political conflict and social turbulence, and in environments in which theorists are relatively free to express and publish their opinions. Moreover, the intellectual quality of the culture, including the calibre of education, would seem to be significant. Finally, eras marked by great political theories have been characterized by varying degrees of optimism, and an absence of cynicism, about prospects for the future. These fundamental conditions – conflict, freedom, intellectual quality, optimism – will be reviewed in turn. In each case the hiatus in Roman political theory in the four centuries separating Cicero from St Augustine will be commented upon in some detail as an instructive counter-example. The Roman Empire has been chosen to illustrate how some of the features of its society and culture may have discouraged and even thwarted the emergence of creative political theory.1 In the process, the nature of political theory may be further illuminated. What are we to make of the singular lack of classic political theory during the Empire? After Cicero and the disintegration of the Republic one might well expect a renaissance of political theory continuing the rich legacy of the Greeks. The hectic events of the late 71


Republic and the Empire would certainly seem to be fertile terrain for such an intellectual achievement. The basic problems raised and questions posed by the breakdown of the Republic and the evolution of imperial autocracy, the fecund literary tradition of the first century, and the various political, social, and economic crises of the later years produced, one would think, a climate propitious to wide-ranging speculation and protest, and numerous proposals for far-reaching reforms. Yet nothing of the kind materialized in the centuries separating Cicero from St Augustine. In an epoch of strife and upheaval with such a challenging philosophical inheritance and promising literary culture of so many talented authors, how do we explain the puzzling lacuna in political theory? Why did critical reflection in general and political theory in particular dry up, leaving a wasteland for centuries? To my knowledge this hiatus has never been remarked upon by later political theorists or commentators today. The failure to do so is almost as odd as the disjunction itself. Perhaps our own lack of attention has most to do with the vast distance of the historical period from us. Four centuries, over a millennium and a half ago, no doubt to many, now so accustomed to lightning changes and kaleidoscopic shifts in the historical scene, may seem like no more than four decades in the unfolding of civilized life. Another reason for the oversight may result from a generally negative attitude toward Roman political theory. After Plato and Aristotle, political theory in their mould was a bit thin on the ground during the remainder of classical antiquity. Apart from Cicero, nothing of a systematic nature appeared. Stoicism and Epicureanism, although rich in social and political ideas, contributed little to the genre. The Greek Polybius, with vast Roman experience, important as he is for political theory, was an historian. Cicero was by no means a philosophical giant, and St Augustine was more preoccupied with theological than with political matters. None of these reservations, however, is intended to suggest that the seven centuries after Aristotle’s death were devoid of influential political and social ideas or notions of significant political implications. Far from it! We have only to think of the inventive and perceptive writings of Lucretius, Sallust, St Paul, Philo Judaeus, Seneca, and Tacitus. Of these six luminaries (among others), one was an Epicurean poet, two were historians, one was a proselitizer of Christianity, Philo

Conditions Favouring Political Theory 73

was an Alexandrian Jewish thinker, and Seneca, a brilliant Stoic essayist. This observation, of course, raises the critical question of the distinction between political theory, as I have employed the term, and political thought. The six were not political theorists, but they did have ideas of far-reaching social and political relevance. For instance, among Epicureans and Stoics, there had always been a turning inward, a growing obsession with the health of the individual soul, and an increasing indifference to external circumstances, thus in a sense preparing the way for the individualism and other-worldliness of Augustinian Christianity. These intellectual tendencies, furthermore, were also nourished and strengthened by some of the very social and cultural factors that hampered the development of the political theory so typical of ancient Greece and late medieval and early modern Europe. One conclusion to be drawn is that periods like the Roman Empire, wanting in political theory of the classic kind, nevertheless generate social and political ideas of tremendous influence. Now for a brief assessment of the conditions favourable to the creation of political theory with reference to the counter-example of the Roman Empire.

4.1 Political conflict and social turmoil The golden hours of classic political theory have been times of severe civil distress when society has been plagued by troubles and disrupted by acute conflict. To speak of society, of course, is to refer to conflict. Where society exists so does conflict. Conflict may be a divisive force or a basis of human cooperation and solidarity. Conflict may vary in nature, intensity, and aims, but it is omnipresent. Hence the contention that political theory has commonly flourished in periods of conflict is relatively meaningless unless it is specified that these ages have usually been typified by divisive, widespread, and debilitating contention and upheaval. Some periods have so suffered from severe crises and basic structural change that they are often thought of as important historical watersheds, the termination of the old and the emergence of something new. Fourth-century BC Athens in economic, social, and political decline ending with the collapse of democracy yielded the later Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Skeptics, the early Stoics, and Epicureans. Particularly conducive to political speculation during the late Middle Ages was the almost


constant tension – often erupting in armed conflict – between state and church, and the movement for reform from within the church like conciliarism. Under such stressful conditions appeared the theorizing of John of Salisbury, St Thomas, Aegidius Romanus, Dante Alighieri, Marsiglio of Padua, William of Ockham, John Wyclif, Jean Gerson, and Nicolas of Cusa. Without his embroilment in the bloody strife between the houses of Lancaster and York during the Wars of the Roses, Sir John Fortescue might never have composed his masterful treatment of natural law. Later, the severe troubles in sixteenth-century Italy, France, and England were the disturbing context for the reflections of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Gianotti, Botero, Hotman, Du Plessis Mornay, Bodin, More, Starkey, the Commonwealthmen, Thomas Smith, and Richard Hooker. Hobbes, the Levellers, Harrington, Locke, and Sidney lived and wrote during the acute English revolutionary struggles. The ancien régime and the autocracy of French absolutism, to be swept away by the momentous events of 1789 and afterwards, produced Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, the Utopians, Babeuf, and Condorcet; and from the comparatively peaceful shelter across the channel: Hume, Burke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Paine. American revolutionary strife and the foundation of a new state gave rise to the ideas of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. Nineteenthcentury industrialization and the development of capitalism with their profound structural problems were the seedbed of the theorizing of Saint-Simon, Hegel, Fourier, Bentham, Tocqueville, James Mill, J. S. Mill, Marx and Engels, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Green. Democracy was sometimes a burning issue in these turbulent epochs. The propertied usually felt threatened by existing democratic regimes as in ancient Athens, or in the authoritarian polities of modern Europe, by increasing demands for popular participation in government. Political theorists have commonly taken sides in the contest, a few becoming spokesmen for the democrats, many more arguing the case for the opposition. In times of political conflict and social turmoil most typically fostering political theory, crucial questions so characteristic of the genre begin to be raised by enquiring individuals. Reacting to the injustices arising in such seas of troubles, thinkers ponder the nature of a just political order and how the current situation can best be remedied. Political theorists seek to provide orientation and direction, and


some hope for the future, to enlighten readers by defining the causes of their common difficulties and how they can be rectified. A political theory, therefore, serves to map the route to a more salubrious and secure political and social life. Few more turbulent epochs have occurred in Western European history than the four centuries between the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC and the capture of the city of Rome by Christianized Vandals in AD 410. After the death of Caesar the rule of the Second Triumvirate ended in Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 27 BC. As Augustus Caesar he transformed the tattered remnants of the ancient republic into a relatively stable monarchy. It survived in the West until AD 487, first as the Principate. Then continuing from the third century, as the Dominate that became increasingly despotic under emperors who were dominus et deus – master and god – and all the title signified for subjects. The familiar story of these grim four centuries needs no retelling, save to emphasize that it was an age of perpetual strife and discord characterized by many short-lived regimes, palace revolts, bloody civil wars, widespread banditry, foreign invasions, and peasant uprisings in the provinces. The urban masses were kept at heel by bread and circuses. A massive governmental apparatus and professional standing army brought some peace and security to the Empire’s millions. The social division ever widened between the haves and have nots, between the ruling privileged class of the very wealthy, perhaps in the late Empire numbering under 1 per cent of the total population, and the increasingly impoverished, overwhelming majority of poor, not to mention an enormous force of slaves. Even more than in the past, Rome had become an inflexibly gradated status and hierarchical class society based on family, power and wealth, divided into many degrees of patrons and clients, all supremely conscious of their exclusive rankings within the social pyramid. These developments in the last centuries were aggravated by declining population, oppressive taxation, burgeoning inflation, food shortages, abandonment of agricultural land, a fall of productivity, the disappearance of an urban ‘middle-class’, and the disintegration of urban community life. Increasing privatization of state functions and endemic corruption at all levels of government and society facilitated the final collapse of Empire. To further complicate the depressing scene of constant deterioration and decay, from the fourth century Rome became a Christian


Empire, rejecting the traditional religion, and later was divided between West and East, the latter centred in Constantinople and surviving until 1453. It seems astonishing, therefore, that what might be called this extended crisis (with some short earlier periods of relative peace and harmony), especially in view of the rich cultural heritage of Greece and Rome, produced no classic political theory, although the first years of Empire were not deficient in seminal political and social ideas. One would expect that in such an era of turmoil, trials, and tribulations, just the opposite would be the case. Why was there no political theory worthy of remembrance? To suggest an answer, we must turn to other conditions possibly necessary for the fruition of political theory. Were they present, or was their absence the explanation of the demise of political theory?

4.2 Freedom of expression Political theory ideally requires a social environment of freedom of expression. In early modern Europe, theorists were seldom persecuted for their beliefs, and book burnings were a rarity. This state of affairs was due in part to the prudence of the theorists themselves. They might reserve their most contentious works, as Bodin did with his Heptaplomeres, for posthumous publication. Or they might write anonymously as Locke did with the Two Treatises. Or they might resort to coded messages. Montesquieu vilified French absolutism in the Persian Letters in the guise of a detailed description of the despotic life and atmosphere of the seraglio. More importantly, at various times in Europe, there were always safe havens of freedom in which a theorist might seek refuge and write as he pleased, or where his works could be published without governmental repression. England at various times, and Holland are leading examples. Although The Prince and Discourses of Machiavelli were after his death placed upon the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, they were translated and published in Protestant England, and became best sellers there and elsewhere, until the ban was lifted in the nineteenth century. Holland proved to be a sanctuary for persecuted authors, and for the publication of their books. Locke lived there for eight years in self-imposed exile where the Letter on Toleration was first printed. Marx moved to England in the nineteenth


century, writing and publishing Capital in the free and tolerant atmosphere of London. The situation was quite different in the early and late Roman Empire. Whereas in fourth-century Athens and late republican Rome, freedom of expression and publication existed, under the Empire, it was usually far too dangerous for authors to voice their opinions openly, especially when critical of Emperor and government. While they might be exiled for their beliefs from the city of Rome, authors could not avoid persecution by fleeing to really safe havens. A single all embracing regime existed in contrast to the plurality of states and governments in early modern Europe. Augustus set the tone for the following centuries of imperial rule by refusing to tolerate authors opposed to his rule and its values. After the firstcentury despotisms of the Julio-Claudians and Flavians, the more enlightened attitudes of the ‘Good Emperors’ of the second century – Nerva, Trajan, Antonius Pius, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius – were evidently not enough to revive fundamental social and political criticism, even if there were intellectuals and literati wishing to engage in such probing reflection. In the first century under the vicious, bloody, arbitrary Caligula (37–41) and Nero (54–68), and the iron-fisted and ruthless despotism of Vespasian (69–70) and Domitian (81–96), a writer’s well-being depended upon imperial whim. Book burnings of the works of authors fallen from favour occurred under Augustus and Tiberius. Philosophers were banished from the city of Rome in 71 and 93 AD. Execution, imprisonment, and exile were always the threat to keep writers in line. Because of their involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy against the infamous Nero in 65–66 AD, a number of distinguished literati and intellectuals (including Lucan, Seneca, Persius), largely of Stoic persuasion, lost their lives. The century’s second conspiracy of 93–94 was ruthlessly suppressed by Domitian. Nor were the conspirators’ friends and families immune to imperial wrath. Intellectuals, of course, might turn to writing history, but this in itself, for obvious reasons, could also be extremely hazardous. Tacitus, holding high office under Domitian, did not dare publish his Histories (treating the period, 69–96 AD) and the Annals (from 14 to 68 AD) until the death of his autocratic master and the more liberal regime of Trajan. The great historian’s friend, Pliny the Younger, likewise accommodated his activities to the severe imperial repression, as


did Pliny’s uncle, who compiled the politically innocuous multivolumed natural history. Although conditions were ripe for the appearance of political theory in the early and late Empire, sheer governmental terrorism was a major inhibiting factor. The lack of freedom and toleration, and the punitive measures of government stifling criticism and opposition led to the conformity, collaboration, and docility of intellectuals and men of letters.

4.3 Intellectual quality and education As to the intellectual quality of the cultures in which political theory has flourished, a few preliminary comments are necessary before turning to the test case of Rome. In the course of our reflections on the subject several tantalizing questions should be kept in mind, questions to which only impressionistic responses can be made, not definitive or direct answers. How did Roman intellectuals from the first century onwards compare to previous and subsequent political theorists? Did the Romans reveal a potential that under more favourable circumstances might have been fully realized in political and social speculation of the classic kind? First, some thoughts are in order about the lives of the major theorists of two of the golden ages of political theory: fourth-century Athens and seventeenth-century England. Both Plato and Aristotle were highly educated, widely read, and well-travelled. Of the Greek aristocracy, they lived in a period of aristocratic decline when democracy in Athens had attained its zenith. With political as well as intellectual motives, they founded long lasting schools for the education of their contemporaries. Plato, a pupil of Socrates, was a superb prose stylist steeped in the philosophic thought of his predecessors and keenly interested in mathematics. Aristotle, student of Plato at the Academy where he joined the faculty, was, judging from the few surviving works polished for publication, an excellent stylist with a vast knowledge of ancient thinkers and social and political institutions. Possessing an encyclopedic mind, with a passion for the natural sciences, especially biology (he was a physician), his intellectual strength was taxonomic and classificatory. Both great thinkers, at one time or another, were involved in politics: Plato in Sicily where he sought unsuccessfully to realize in practice his ideal of the philosopher-king; and Aristotle as an agent


of the royal household of Macedonia. A worthy legatee of this formidable intellectual tradition, Cicero was a country gentleman, tutored in law by the greatest legal minds of the age. He studied philosophy in Athens and Rhodes, attaining the pinnacle of political power as consul in 63 BC, later serving as pro-consul in Asia Minor. One of the West’s most gifted and influential prose stylists, he displayed a profound knowledge of the philosophic schools of his age and before. Seventeenth-century England has given us two giants of the genre Hobbes and Locke, worthy successors of the classical greats, who would surely be on any short list of the outstanding political theorists. Other contemporaries of lesser stature, but nonetheless important were: Lilburne, Winstanley, Filmer, Harrington, Petty, and Sidney. Neither Hobbes nor Locke was aristocratic, although attaining gentlemanly status in adulthood. Both were Oxonians, Locke becoming a don. Both lived, studied, and travelled on the Continent. As well as modern languages, they knew Latin and Greek, and were steeped in the ancient classics, and well abreast of the latest scientific and intellectual developments of their century. Locke, a physician, serving his medical apprenticeship under the renowned Thomas Sydenham, was a friend and associate of the distinguished Robert Boyle. Hobbes was entranced by Euclid and Galileo, and in Paris moved in the intellectual circle that included Mersenne and Gassendi. Locke, not Hobbes, was a genuine political animal, having been enmeshed in party intrigue since his early years, and later holding several minor governmental posts. Hobbes’ intellectual activities depended on the private patronage of the wealthy aristocracy, as did Locke’s for a time. His income was also derived from modest landed rents, teaching, governmental service, and shrewd financial investment. For different political reasons, the two thinkers were forced to live in exile for extended periods: Hobbes in France; and Locke in France and Holland. Each was concerned by what he believed to be the decay of the educational standards of their class, Locke devoting a book to the subject. Both wrote masterpieces in political theory, and Locke composed one of the most brilliant treatises of modern philosophy. Hobbes is undoubtedly one of the eminent stylists in the English language, outshining Locke, whose own literary talent, however, should not be discounted. Now for the Roman Empire. There is general scholarly agreement that Latin literature, history, and philosophy after the Silver Age of


the late first century declined in both quality and quantity. Such luminaries as Petronius, Lucan, Juvenal, Persius, Seneca, and Tacitus, failed to launch a vigorously critical tradition that reproduced itself. The literary revival of two and a half centuries later was only a faint echo of the previous high point. One reason for the decay was undoubtedly the pressure for conformity by regimes utilizing terror and ideological control. Another reason was that the Roman elite of power and wealth, previously producing many of the cultural luminaries, had been reduced after the turn of the first century largely to a coterie of the Emperor’s men, faithful servants beholden to him for their status and influence, and naturally extremely reluctant to criticize or oppose the established order. Still another important factor was the deterioration in the quality of education already occurring and noted by contemporaries in the first century and reaching a nadir in the third century. This educational decay has not been overlooked by historians of the Empire. Thus Chester Starr comments on the degeneration by the second century: ‘The first marks of this decline were archaism, erudition, repetitiousness, affected style, emphasis on collecting the wisdom of the past, and romanticism. All these centred on men’s inability to engage in original, fresh thinking within classical frames …’.2 He then observes that ‘in the second century philosophy reached its lowest point in antiquity as practitioners juggled the old ideas in a dreary mishmash of Stoic, Academic, and to a lesser degree Epicurean ideas or haggled over verbiage in learned conclave …’. Likewise, Ramsay MacMullen stresses the waning of the preparatory training of the governing elite from the third century.3 Oratorical and literary education had degenerated into pedantry. Geographical knowledge decreased. Mathematics, no longer relished, was neglected, and numeracy among the elite was completely inadequate for the urgent tasks in hand. History had been deformed into a mere recitation of trivia. First century literati and intellectuals, themselves, were already sensitive to what they perceived as the lowering of educational standards. In mid-century Petronius in Satyricon reflects upon the decline of rhetoric.4 Whereas rhetoric and declamation, he thinks, are absolutely essential to a free republic, under the Principate they had simply deteriorated into mindless fashion. He refers to the ‘loud empty phrases’, ‘tripping, empty tones’, and ‘flatulent and formless


flow of words’ in contrast to the stylistic heights of Plato, Demosthenes, and Thucydides. At the century’s close, Tacitus in his earliest work, A Dialogue on Oratory, ruminates on the fall of the art, from a glorious past to its present lamentable state. The Dialogue opens by posing the question for discussion of ‘How is it that whereas former ages were so prolific of great orators, men of genius and renown, on our generation a signal blight has fallen: it lacks distinction in eloquence, and scarce retains so much as the name of “orator”’.5 This demise, he believes, is due to the lack of freedom and the decline of education. Responsibility for the latter is blamed on ‘the laziness of our young men, the carelessness of parents, the ignorance of teachers, and the decay of the old-fashioned virtue’.6 Children are no longer seriously instructed in the fundamentals, what we might call a woeful neglect of the ‘three Rs’. Scant attention is given to reading the classics, studying the past, or even to the most basic factual knowledge. Students are not required to study the principles of ethics so as to enable them to distinguish right from wrong, nor is serious consideration given to the examination of human nature. Tutelage in the essentials of law, music, and geometry has also suffered. These misgivings of Petronius and Tacitus, among others, preview the perilous straits into which Roman culture was to fall in the next centuries. Of equal interest is their awareness that the erosion had already commenced in the early years of the Principate. In view of these appraisals what can be said of the first-century critics and opponents of the regime? Who were they and what did they stand for? Resistance in the first century was the last wave of protest from within the governing elite. Thereafter, opposition gradually shifted from the upper to the lower orders, to peasants, bandits, and barbarians. The two major protests of the first century were the last Roman example grounded in an intellectual outlook. Opponents of the regime were either philosophers themselves or influenced by philosophers. Indeed, the two conspiracies were possibly the sole instances in Western history of philosophers and their acolytes ‘manning the barricades’ and sacrificing their lives for their principles, a truly remarkable phenomenon worthy of commemoration. Stoicism was clearly the philosophy inspiring elitist opposition and criticism. The cults of Cato and Brutus and of the heroic assassination of Julius Caesar was nourished and idealized by Stoics, becoming


popular among intellectuals and literati. Possibly the last serious discussion of the restoration of the Republic occurred in an overnight session of the Senate following Caligula’s death. The next day Nero became emperor. Afterwards, no one took seriously the question of returning to republican government, although Stoics were deeply implicated in the two conspiracies of the century in 65–66 and 93–94. Far from embodying in a meaningful way the ideal of the universal brotherhood of man, Stoicism by this time was an aristocratic creed, contemptuous of the masses, and highly individualistic. Apart from the goal of freeing the upper orders from imperial repression, the chief contribution of Stoicism to an ideology of opposition appears to be that it steeled its adherents to act from their innermost convictions. The Stoic protesters were a tightly knit circle from the governing class, holders of high office, largely of the new nobility, wealthy, cultured, and usually interrelated by an intricate web of blood and marriage. While the Stoics offered little in the way of a political programme or a political theory for guidance and orientation in opposition to imperial repression, they apparently agreed on a number of tenets. First and foremost was their dedication to libertas. Freedom, however, was not to be extended to the vast majority of the Roman people. The protesters were vehemently anti-democratic, utterly disdainful of the masses, and contemptuous of provincials. Freedom was to be the exclusive privilege of the elite, of individuals like themselves to express their opinions without governmental interference or demands for conformity. The rule of law, of course, was the requisite of such freedom, so that senators and equestrians and their families would be immune to the whims and arbitrary dictates of a tyrant on the throne. Furthermore, the opponents were convinced that senators and magistrates should have a genuine governing role instead of being merely window dressing for imperial machinations. Since the revival of the Republic was now largely a dead issue, the protesters seemed to agree that the Principate was necessary for the stability and order of the Empire, and that it would best achieve those ends by the recommended reforms. That this ideology of resistance was quite insubstantial, holding little promise of more detailed articulation into a full-fledged, political theory, seems to be a judgement on the men, the culture, and the times. The Stoic ideologues were too blinkered by their circumstances and their narrowly conceived purpose of power-sharing with the


Emperor ‘to engage in original, fresh thinking within classical frames’, in Chester Starr’s previously quoted words. Classical political theory had obviously gasped its last breath. Living later than these largely Stoic protesters, more might be expected of Tacitus – towering as he does above his contemporaries – in respect to political and social criticism and programmatic prescriptions, notwithstanding his historical mode of discourse. Ronald Mellor possibly succumbs to his enthusiasm for the great historian in calling him ‘the most profound moral and political philosopher that pagan Rome ever produced’.7 While Tacitus was a brilliant historian and unsurpassed stylist, he was technically speaking not a philosopher, and his social and political ideas never succeeded in transcending the earlier febrile ideology of the Stoic opposition. Rejecting republicanism, he cleaved to their ideal of a liberalized Principate, looking to the ‘Good Emperor’ Trajan as a distinct hope for the future. Committed to freedom for the elite and the rule of law, Tacitus was anti-democratic, distrustful of the masses, trusting that a regenerated senatorial order, purged of corruption, might help in improving the situation. Imperialism, not withstanding the degradation of the Empire, was the only alternative to anarchy and insecurity. Despite holding what had become a fairly commonplace set of attitudes, Tacitus, nevertheless, serves to introduce the discussion in the next section, for he is a pessimist par excellence. He offers a dark and brooding picture of decadence, corruption, and dictatorship, anatomizing in minute detail the techniques of despotic power, and revealing the arcana imperii of tyrannical government in oppressing the Roman people. His bleak and disturbing sketches of the historical actors of the first century are informed by the gloomy conception of human nature of his historical mentor, Sallust, probably in turn derived from Thucydides. Tacitus seemingly agrees with Sallust that since the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BC Rome had been afflicted with the disease of moral and political degeneration. In the more than two intervening centuries, the malady had so spread and deepened, that Tacitus evidently feels the prognosis is terminal, although temporary relief might be rendered by certain remedial measures. Good men now have no choice but to collaborate, as he and Seneca do, with iniquitous regimes no matter how oppressive, striving to work for improvement from within the corridors of power, and courageously confronting the future no matter what it


might bring. The starkly realistic and dark tone of his history offers little that could assist and comfort his contemporaries, beyond the conviction that they must strive to do what is possible in the worst of possible worlds and steadfastly prepare to accept all eventualities. Tacitus’ long sustained cry of anguished despair and hopelessness is hardly the stuff from which classic political theory has been wrought. Indeed, this kind of haunting pessimism about past, present, and future seems fundamentally hostile to the creation of political theory of the first order.

4.4 Optimism about the future A major obstacle to the revitalization of political theory in the Roman Empire was the all-pervasive doom and gloom afflicting intellectuals and literati from the last years of the Republic, increasing in the first century AD and persisting until the very end. Throughout Western history political theory has usually come to the fore and flourished in periods characterized by some optimism about the capability of humans to reform and resuscitate their polities, by hope that a striving for social improvement is not in vain, and that the present holds some promise for the future. Fifth and fourth-century BC Athens, late medieval Europe, and the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries have by and large been eras of sanguine expectations. During the three or four centuries prior to the twentieth, Western European and North American thinkers were in the main optimistic about the future, their perspective gradually imbued with a belief in material, intellectual, moral, and even social and political progress, only to give way to a new wave of growing unease in our own times. The deep pessimism of Roman intellectuals and literati during the Principate and Dominate has often been discussed, although no effort has been made to link it with the decline of political theory. For example, Ramsay MacMullen notes that the first few hopeful years of Augustus’ reign were succeeded by ‘total historical pessimism’ and the conviction that ‘Rome had fallen on irreversible decay’.8 He does not, however, refer to the roots of the pessimism that seem to have predated the final collapse of the Republic and the foundation of the Principate. In his recent study of Tacitus, Ronald Mellor also writes of the gloomy outlook of Roman intellectuals. He emphasizes the ‘unremitting bleakness of his vision’ and ‘dark tone’


of Tacitus, ‘one of the great pessimists in the Western tradition’.9 His pessimism traces back to Sallust, the climax of the tendency being reached in St Augustine. Taking my cue from MacMullen and Mellor, I shall stress that the endemic gloom preceded Sallust who crystallized the trait already noticeable in three of the outstanding literary figures of the late Republic: Catullus, Lucretius, and Cicero. It was perhaps this pervasive pessimism along with the lack of freedom, decline of educational standards, and eventually the quality of the literati and intellectuals themselves that may help to account for the withering of classical political theory in the Empire. Two late republican poets, both of Epicurean provenance – Catullus (?84–?54 BC) and Lucretius (?96–55 BC) – heralded the intellectual and literary pessimism that was to permeate the Empire.10 Catullus paints a lurid picture of the moral degeneration of his day. Notables including Julius Caesar wallow in a slough of unbridled desire, driven furiously by their insatiable and restless appetites for wealth, power, and sexual gratification. Venerated ancestral custom and traditional time-honoured values are simply an empty shell, a sham of words without meaning. He intimates that the past was no better than the present. The much vaunted heroism and nobility of the forefathers is little more than a fiction. The hollowness of contemporary public life continues the emptiness of yesterday. To escape this colossal deception, individuals have little recourse but to turn within themselves, and to renew and refine their sensibilities in a quest for authentic personal relationships. Lucretius’ great poem, De rerum natura, completed about 54 BC and perhaps benefitting from the editorial hand of Cicero, expounded Epicurus’ materialistic conception of nature. He begins Book Five by alluding to the perils of the present age and to the importance of the common welfare. Thereafter, Book Five is punctuated with a sombre pessimism concerning social life. The pointless struggle of men for position and wealth in the state is stressed. Lucretius invokes the myth of Sisyphus to illustrate the meaningless, wearisome, and constant struggle for power and authority, never ending save for a perpetual and fruitless repetition of human exertions. As social life develops, men in their greed for wealth and power are plunged into endless divisiveness and discord. In their anxiety solace is sought in the superstition of gods and religion. Meanwhile, social life with its conflict and warfare continues, inexorably and directionless. Fashions constantly


shift from one thing to another. Objects, originally thought to be of unsurpassed value come to be deemed worthless. Lucretius concludes Book Five: ‘So the race of man is always labouring in vain and to no purpose, and spending its days in empty cares … we have brought our lives bit by bit to the highest luxury, and we have roused from their utmost depths the mighty tides of war.’11 Cicero (106–43 BC), whose De re publica and De legibus represent the last lustrous effort at systematic political theory for over a millennium shares at times in this profound pessimism from the standpoint of a member of the ruling classes. His purpose is to educate and enlighten younger Romans of the elite by attempting to revive the spirit of the ancestral constitution so as to inspire them with the noble ideas, ideals, and actions of their forefathers that would spur them on to rejuvenate the floundering state and reinstate it on the proper course. After 60 and his own fall from power, Rome for Cicero had ceased to be a state ‘when laws had no force in it, when the courts of justice were abased, when ancestral custom had been overthrown, when the officers of government had been exiled, and the name of the senate was unknown …’.12 Cicero was appalled by the savage contest for riches and power when Rome was ‘shackled by violence and crushed by a conspiracy of desperadoes …’.13 Caesar’s dictatorship doomed the Republic. ‘Gone, gone for ever is that valour that used to be found in this Republic’, Cicero laments, writing to his friend Atticus, of the ‘empty husks of the real old Roman Republic we used to know’.14 Rome has now become ‘Romulus’ cesspool’.15 Somewhat less graphically, but no less passionately, he had already lamented in De re publica that while ‘the republic, when it came to us, was like a beautiful painting, whose colours, however, were already fading with age, our own time not only has neglected to freshen it by renewing the original colours, but has not even taken the trouble to preserve its configuration, and so to speak, its general outlines’.16 Rome has lost its ancient customs and virtuous men so that today ‘we retain only the form of the commonwealth, but have long since lost its substance’. Cicero had a worthy successor in despair, the father of Roman historiography, Sallust (86–34 BC), author of two historical monographs and the fragmentary Histories. He maintains that the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC (suppressed by Cicero holding consular office) had transformed the ‘noblest and best’ ancestral commonwealth into


the ‘worst and most vicious’17 But the rot had set in long before. Sallust argues that, with the final removal in 146 BC of the age-old formidable Carthaginian threat and when Rome was no longer fearful for its survival and the world’s only superpower, the social and political decay began and gained momentum at an alarming rate. Mounting economic prosperity from the spoils of imperial expansion led to lust for power, avarice, wealth, luxury, and indolence. Romans no longer dedicated themselves as in the past to honour, integrity, the pursuit of glory, and the veneration of the gods. Rome became engulfed by licentious conduct, and hopelessly divided by civil turmoil. Youths were corrupted, poverty considered a disgrace, and everyone and everything had a price. Sallust’s gloomy analysis deepens in the Histories. He explains, resorting to a psychological conception, that Roman difficulties occur because of a restless and socially destructive defect of human nature, which unless checked breaks forth into a ceaseless struggle for liberty, glory, power, and riches. Evidently because of this human deficiency, he now contends that social and political conflict had occurred from the very foundation itself of the Roman state. Internal unity and harmony, in the course of Roman history, had only been periodically and temporarily restored by fear of an external enemy. Since the final threat of Carthage had ended and Rome was supreme without rivals in the world, the internal conflict and decay were so deep and all pervasive that any possibility of renewal is apparently problematic for Sallust. At the risk of anachronistic thinking and simplistic historical analysis, one cannot help wondering whether there are not some vague parallels between the Roman experience and our own situation today. It is obviously far too soon to offer a judgement about the possibility of the flowering of political theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The times are certainly ripe for the appearance of creative and challenging political theory. The collapse of the Soviet empire, the global triumph of capitalism, and American world hegemony have ushered in an epoch far from being free from conflict, political discord, and social decay. The multiplying social and political problems confronting us are far too apparent to all who are not completely caught up in the euphoria of triumphant capitalism and the uninhibited pursuit of wealth and power. But if the material conditions are present for the flourishing of political theory, what of the other factors? We in the West, at least, may have achieved unprecedented


freedom of expression and toleration of diverse opinions, but the increasing pressures for conformism in a capitalist culture, reinforced by the mass media, threaten to undermine our very accomplishments. While educational improvement has become the much touted goal of parents, teachers, and politicians, the remedy sought through technology – computerization, the internet, the information highway – seems to compound the difficulties rather than solve the problems. The current reforms reduce education to the amassing of facts instead of the nurture of the intellect, of critical understanding, historical perspective, and aesthetic sensibility. Finally, amidst the enthusiastic promises of a bright future of economic and social betterment, a corrosive pessimism has seized hold of many intellectuals and literati, and people in general. Whether this is the consequence of two bloody world wars, and the other unbelievable atrocities committed during the twentieth century, or the creeping realization that capitalist triumphalism has produced more problems than are being solved is far from clear. Whatever the explanation, increasing numbers of people, disenchanted with the idea of progress and growing more cynical about the possibility of genuine social and political reform, are turning increasingly inward and becoming ever more obsessed with their psychic and physical state of well-being in a plethora of forms: psychoanalysis, yoga, religious fundamentalism, jogging, health clubs, and even postmodernism. This radical individualism and fixation on the self is even reflected in the tidal wave sweeping over us of neoliberal economics with its rejection of ‘society’ and obsession with the free market. Whether political theory in the classic mould will be able to survive much less flourish, only time will tell.

Part II Studying Political Theory

5 Philosophical Mode of Analysis

The remainder of the book concentrates on different ways of studying political theory. At the risk of considerable oversimplification, two ‘pure’ modes or approaches can be identified: the philosophical and the historical. In reality, scholarly endeavours lie somewhere between the two ideal types, most being closer to the philosophical than to the historical. This chapter generalizes about the philosophical mode from the critical perspective of my version of the historical approach outlined in the next chapter. Chapter 7 is my estimate of the value for studying political theory of one variety of the historical mode, Marxism, which today in a time of capitalist triumphalism and socialist decline is in my opinion unjustifiably belittled and increasingly discounted. Although my preference for the historical over the philosophical will become progressively apparent, the evaluation of the latter should certainly not be misconstrued as completely negative or unreasonably dismissive. The two modes are by no means antithetical in spite of my criticism of philosophy and the philosophical. Each approach can fruitfully supplement the other, and when joined together can make the most rewarding contribution to the examination of political theory. My sole purpose has been to make a case for more historical analysis and to right what I take to be an intellectual imbalance: a prejudice in contemporary scholarship in favour of the philosophical mode, although some of it passes as historical. Accordingly this chapter deals with three aspects of the philosophical approach. Attention will first be given to what seems a deeply ingrained and unwarranted bias in Western culture for the philosophical as a superior and dispassionate type of mental activity, 91

92 Studying Political Theory

a prejudice that may help explain its popularity in the assessment of political theory. This will be followed by an effort to delineate the philosophical outlook of one relevant and exceedingly influential brand of discourse analysis, that of the ‘Cambridge School’ of political theorists; and then by suggesting that no worthwhile philosophical approach to political theory can avoid admitting important historical elements into its analysis. The philosophical mode focuses upon the internal relationships of the words, propositions, and ideas of a classic text of political theory. Emphasis is given to the analysis and evaluation of concepts, the logic of argumentation, and the consistency of the major political ideas, often with the aim of judging the theorist’s contribution to one or more of the so-called perennial problems of political philosophy such as obligation, authority, justice, freedom, and equality. Although the notions thus scrutinized tend to be treated almost as if they constituted an autonomous world of abstractions without external referents, history is frequently employed to ‘illuminate’ a text by way of ‘background’ and to ‘enrich’ our understanding of it. History is also used in the form of constructing a genealogy of ideas, tracing the influence of a thinker’s predecessors and contemporaries on his own thought, and in turn the influence of his ideas on succeeding theorists, all typifying the ‘history of ideas’ genre. More will be said about these matters later, but this is sufficient for the moment to distinguish the prototypical philosophical style of analysis from the historical mode that tries to explicate the meaning of a text by firmly locating it in the appropriate social, political and economic contexts and to define as precisely as possible the relationship between the theorists’ realms of ideas and the world of action in which they lived and wrote.

5.1 The ivory tower syndrome One reason why the philosophical mode may be more fashionable than the historical mode among students of political theory has possibly less to do with intellectual conviction than with inherent cultural attitude. Since Socrates, the philosopher has been placed on a pedestal. Of all mental activities, not of a scientific or mathematical bent, philosophy has generally been considered the highest; and the material world, to which so much of philosophy since Socrates has traditionally opposed its sphere of pure ideas, has often been

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seen as a somewhat grubby, transient realm of necessity. Even when they are dealing with very immediate social and political issues (as Socrates himself certainly was), they are seen to be doing so from a more exalted perspective, which sets them apart from the selfinterested engagements or prejudices of lesser mortals. One of the traits of philosophy found in Plato and continuing to the present has been its role of mystification. Philosophers sometimes indulge in intellectual obscurantism in order to disguise in the name of ‘truth’ the real social and political implications of what they are expounding – often of a distinctly partisan nature – from the unwary reader. But to discover some of the reasons for the high repute of philosophy and the cultural prejudices exalting it, let us return to the beginnings and briefly reconstruct what might be called the ‘historical sociology’ of philosophy and its various implications. Diogenes Laertius tells us that Pythagoras first used ‘philosophy’ and called himself a ‘philosopher’, or lover of wisdom.1 Plato, who probably visited the Pythagoreans in southern Italy, employed the terms, possibly to distinguish his own brand of intellectual activity from that of sophists, ‘wise men’, a word often used to include poets, whom he also abhorred. Sophists, from his perspective, were errant tradesmen, itinerant ‘retailers of ideas’, telling the crowd what they wished to hear and paid for doing so, whereas he and his pupils were on a much higher plane, lovers of wisdom, not hawkers of wares to be sold and bought in the agora. For Plato and Aristotle philosophy was a worthy and highly dignified endeavour, befitting a gentleman, but far beyond the capacity of the multitude. Leisure was absolutely essential so that the philosopher unencumbered by the necessity of making a living might give complete vent to his curiosity and in the pursuit of truth experience to the fullest the wonder of the intellectual firmament. Philosophy’s foremost goals were virtue, self-sufficiency, and happiness, suggested by Aristotle’s lines that ‘like a good helmsmen’, the philosopher ‘moors his life to that which is eternal and unchanging, drops his anchor there, and lives his own master’.2 While the practical utility of philosophy was not generally stressed by Plato and Aristotle, their lives and selected writings – Republic, Laws and Politics – testify to their belief that it should be a trusted guide in public affairs. It remained for Cicero, as we shall see, to give priority to the practical aim of philosophy, a view that was taken seriously at least as late as John Locke.


Philosophy was a gentlemanly calling for ancient Greeks and Romans, to which Cicero added other suitable vocations: warfare, politics, law, oratory, ‘farming’, and large-scale commerce. Philosophy, indeed, represented the apogee of mental labour because it was the supreme expression of reason and speech, the very essence of the human being. As such, it was contrasted to banausic physical labour, particularly those manual activities ministering to sensual desires. Consequently, there was usually, at least by implication, a gentlemanly snobbery about philosophy, thought to be the exclusive domain of the well-born and wealthy, certainly not of the labouring poor. The apparent attitude was that of two sides of the single coin of nobility. The philosopher stood for nobility of mind; the gentleman, for nobility of body. Physical labour and the absence of leisure, at any rate, were distasteful to the gentleman, and antithetical to true philosophy, or such seems to have been a common gentlemanly view. Possibly, above all, philosophy provided spiritual freedom in contrast to the psychic bondage of people who, unlike gentlemen, because of the necessity of working for a living, could not raise their minds above the requirements of everyday life. There were, however, important if neglected exceptions to these gentlemanly attitudes toward labour and philosophy. In democratic Athens labour was respected by the populace. Writers like Protagoras and dramatists also held labour in repute. As conceived by the aristocratic Plato, ever fearful of democracy and its social and political implications, philosophy was perhaps a reaction to all this. Indeed, one might argue that philosophy was essentially anti-democratic at birth. But there were opposing views. The early Stoics accorded a positive value to physical labour and a novel perception of its relationship to philosophy, an ancient opinion given scant attention by modern historians of philosophy.3 The second head of the Stoic school, Cleanthes, was reported by Diogenes Laertius to have been ‘renowned for his industry, being indeed driven by extreme poverty to work for a living.’4 He was nicknamed Phreantles or ‘well-lifter’ because he worked at night drawing water for gardens, and by day engaged in argumentation. Cleanthes is said to have described his way of life as superior to the wealthy because ‘while they were playing at ball, he was at work digging hard and barren ground’. The early Stoics attached no stigma to physical labour. Far from being demeaning, it was of positive social value, natural, dignified, and entirely in


keeping with virtue. All callings from the loftiest mental labour to the humblest, entailing menial manual work, were natural to humans and morally equal. Nor should the gentleman or philosopher vilify physical labour or abstain from it. Whatever the vocation, one should pursue it as ably as possible, realizing that it is neither superior nor inferior to any other. So it was not unnatural that the Stoics heroized Hercules, the sixth of his twelve labours being the cleansing of the Augean stables, and a popular cult in his name appeared in Rome during the last century of the Republic. The favourable Stoic attitude toward labour persisted, albeit with increasing exceptions. A leader of the school in the first century of the Christian era, Musonius Rufus, recommended that philosophers earn their livings by being shepherds, and his pupil, the former slave, Epictetus praised manual work in his influential writings. This ancient ideal of the ‘workman–philosopher’, as Colish calls it, seems to be one of the less frequented by-roads of the history of ideas. In contrast to this by-road, in the high road of Western thought philosophers were customarily portrayed as being above the fray, the hustle and bustle of the market, the strife and mayhem of politics. They were and meant to be dispassionate, detached observers of life, seldom active participants. The philosopher was free from mundane interests and concerns. In contemporary language, he was not an ideologue because he had transcended ideology, always the outsider, never the insider. Philosophy signified the end of ideology. As Plato reflected in Theaetetas: ‘To take any interest in the rivalries of political cliques, in meetings, dinners, and merrymakings with flute girls, never to them even in dreams … his thought disdaining all such things as worthless, takes wings …’.5 Authoritative corroboration is then supplied by a quotation from Pindar, ‘“beyond the sky, beneath the earth”’, and Plato concludes, ‘searching the heavens and measuring the plains, everywhere seeking the true nature of everything as a whole, never sinking to what lies close at hand’. Cicero furthered the outlook of Plato and Aristotle by popularizing the ideal of the philosopher as a detached and impartial observer, far removed from earthly affairs and free from any taint of self-seeking and self-interest. He relates in Tusculan Disputations the story attributed to Pythagoras of the three types of men at a sports festival, probably the Olympic Games.6 There are those who make money by buying and selling – the avaricious. There are the contestants seeking


fame and glory for themselves – the ambitious. Finally, there are the spectators, desiring neither fortune nor fame – the contemplative: quite the best type of free-born men (maxime ingenuum), who looked neither for applause nor gain, but come for the sake of the spectacle and watched what was done and how it was done. So also we, as though we had come from some city to a kind of crowded festival, leaving in like fashion another life and nature of being, entered upon this life, and some were slaves of ambition (gloriae), some of money; there were a special few (raros) who, counting all else nothing, closely scanned the nature of things (rerum naturam); these men gave themselves the name of lovers of wisdom (sapientia studiosos) (for that is the meaning of the word philosopher (Philosophos); and just as at the games the men of truest breeding (liberalissimum) looked on without any self-seeking (acquirentem), so in life the contemplation and discovery of nature far surpassed all other pursuits. Besides the depiction of philosophers as being above the contest, motivated not by gain or fame, uninvolved and aloof, Cicero’s choice of language – maxime ingenuum, raros, liberalissimum, noble, honourable, distinguished, gentlemanly – indicates that philosophy is definitely not for the rabble, but the preserve of homo liberalis, the gentleman. The trait of the gentleman ideally equipping him for philosophy, at least from Cicero’s viewpoint, is detachment, disengagement from worldly pursuits. This sentiment is also reinforced by Cicero’s interpretation of the purpose of philosophy. Philosophers are observers of the ‘spectacle’ of life closely watching ‘what was done and how it was done’, determined to investigate ‘the nature of things’. ‘Contemplation and the discovery of nature’ are the principal aims of the philosopher. Or to employ Montaigne’s much later gloss on the metaphorical tale, philosophers are ‘spectators of the life of other men in order to judge and regulate their own’.7 Here in a single passage, then, Cicero has synthesized the major characteristics of the philosopher exerting such a tenacious mental grip upon Western culture: detached, gentlemanly, self-sufficient, reflective, and superior. The idea that the speculations of philosophers – even when they are not on social and political matters – are in fact so distant, so far


removed from society is, of course, open to serious question. Philosophy in actuality is never the isolated, transcendent activity of Cicero’s ideal, but an integral component of society, bearing the indelible imprint of the time and social circumstances in which it is written. In addition to the language, examples, and illustrations employed, a philosophical work, both by commission and omission, reflects and expresses the intellectual and cultural concerns of its age. A philosophical work is a priceless social document, a witness to its times. The illusion of the purity of philosophy, untainted by the material world of which it is a part, is a myth exerting a profound fascination throughout the years. In some prescient ruminations on the intimate relationship between thought and its social context, Ernest Gellner, a critic of Oxford linguistic philosophy and distinguished social anthropologist, tellingly comments on the notion that philosophy is divorced from society, and somehow apart and above it all: People do not think in a vacuum, and even if the content and direction of their thought is in part determined by rational considerations, by where the wind of argument and the force of reasons and evidence drive them, these factors never uniquely determined what people think … the choice of problems, the choice of criteria, of solutions, of rigour, of permissible evidence, the selection of hunches to be followed up and of those to be ignored, the choice of the ‘language game’ or the “form of life”, if you like – all these matters which make up a style of thought or the spirit of the times, are not dictated by an immovable reason, and they are at the very least influenced by the social and instiutional milieu of the thinker.8 No philosophy can be so pure, so unsullied by the society in which it is set, as to be completely devoid of all ideological content, to be free of the intellectual passion of the moment in response to other intellectual passions generated in the crucible of existing social arrangements. Philosophers may be like spectators at a festival, but their perceptions of the occasion and its activities cannot entirely escape the mind-set shared with participants, a mutually meaningful way of viewing things, a common sense of actions and utterance, because spectators and participants are joined together in a social collectivity and all it implies. They are spectators and participants


only because of their immersion in the social whole. And, as has been previously noted, from its origins in Plato even the much heralded detachment of philosophy verges on the mythical. It was and perhaps remains deeply ideological and political, a point worth considering in the subsequent remarks on the venerable notion of philosophy as a guide in public affairs. An important feature of the ideal of philosophy cherished by the ancients, including Plato, Aristotle, the later Stoics, and Cicero, was its function in the practical guidance and orientation for the conduct of life. By providing knowledge of virtue and strength of character, philosophy enables the individual to lead a good and happy life. Particularly during times of personal stress, Cicero recommended philosophy as a kind of mental therapy offering spiritual comfort and solace, peace and harmony for the psyche. Internal tensions and anxieties are purged through philosophy. One’s cares, fears, and passions are sublimated, and flagging spirits are raised, resulting in tranquillity, self-sufficiency, and independence. Philosophy, however, is not only a friend and mentor in personal life, but it also serves beneficially in giving direction to the conduct of public affairs. Philosophy is indispensable in the political arena. On this point Cicero follows the course set by Plato and Aristotle. Politics, if it is to rise above the shortsighted participants in so much of public life who usually only compound the problems, must be infused with philosophy and revitalized by it. Through philosophical reflection the most appropriate political ends are selected, the nature of a wellordered state ascertained, and the means devised for its realization. In acting to achieve these aims, in times of success and triumph as well as desperation and failure, the political actor can always count on the beneficent aid of philosophy. So entranced was Cicero by the idea that he even believed that in the past philosophy had been the animus of social and political life, exclaiming: O philosophy, thou guide of life, o thou explorer of virtue and expeller of vice! Without thee what could have become not only of me but of the life of man altogether? Thou has given birth to cities, thou hast called scattered human beings into the bond of social life, thou has united them first of all in joint habitations, next in wedlock, then in the ties of common literature and speech, thou has discovered law, thou has been the teacher of


morality and order: to thee I fly for refuge, from thee I look for aid, to thee I entrust myself, as once in ample measure, so now wholly and entirely.9 Throughout the centuries philosophy continued to be thought of as a most necessary guide in practical life. Many years after Cicero, John Locke, so intellectually indebted to the Roman, wrote his magnum opus on empirical philosophy for the practical guidance of his readers. His self-proclaimed purpose in composing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was to improve and enhance the conduct of our lives and to contribute to ‘the management of our great Concerns’.10 By which he meant that the book would help men act more rationally and effectively in religion, politics, and law. By the end of the twentieth century, however philosophy is no longer conceived of in this fashion. My emphasis is on philosophy in the English-speaking world. Perhaps a growing professionalism since the nineteenth century and the hiving off of psychology and the sciences as separate disciplines explain the changing attitude, perhaps the increasing technical vocabulary and conceptualization and often narrow scope of the problems addressed. What original philosophical work of our age has become a popular best seller, as Locke’s Essay did in the eighteenth century? Students of philosophy in our universities are in rapid decline. While philosophy still often clings to the old myth of detachment, transcendence of self-interest, and intellectual superiority, the suggestion that it can guide the lives of readers in their personal and political problems has evaporated. The contrast in attitude between the practical purpose of philosophy stipulated by past thinkers, and the contemporary professional outlook is underscored by reference to a recent volume, Being a Philosopher: the History of a Practice. ‘Philosophical thought’, states the author, D. W. Hamlyn, ‘involves an ability to sort out abstract concepts and to make clear what is a presupposition for what’.11 Philosophy, he continues, enables us to step back from the fray with a degree of objectivity rarely found in other disciplines, and to tender dispassionate criticism of the way things are being done. As gadflies philosophers can helpfully challenge prevailing opinions and beliefs, bring a clarity of mind to the possible resolution of questions at issue and get behind those questions, thereby stimulating the intellectual atmosphere. Hamlyn, of course, is dealing largely with tendencies in


the English-speaking world (as I am), perhaps paying insufficient attention to ‘Continental’ philosophy. Nevertheless, within his purview, reflective of a widespread attitude of the profession, philosophy receives a much more modest evaluation when compared with the encomia of the ancients and early moderns. The psychological function of philosophy has disappeared, as has the guidance in the ‘management of our great Concerns’. Critical detachment, mental superiority, and clarity are about all that remains. No wonder that Terry Eagleton can attribute to Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century, the view that philosophy ‘could say something – but nothing that was really important’.12 Whether one agrees with Eagleton’s characterization is beside the point. The fact that he could make such a judgment is a sign of the depletion of the role and function of philosophy today. If philosophers are no longer commonly considered the significant guides and teachers in our personal and practical lives they once were, the notion of their impartiality, objectivity, intellectual superiority, and even gentlemanliness has persisted. This seems to account for a syndrome of snobbery to be detected in some academic and intellectual circles. Philosophers, it is sometimes felt if never explicitly expressed in so many words, form a breed apart, intellectually more sophisticated and intelligent than lesser mortals, the peers of the academic realm whose authoritative pronouncements on a diversity of nonphilosophic subjects are often received with deference. The frequently heard verdict of disdain that a subject is of ‘little philosophical interest’ sometimes carries the patronizing implication that the matter is intellectually inferior and really not worthy of consideration by finer minds. Perhaps, from this perspective, Marx’s cardinal sin was not that he was a revolutionary but that he was a renegade philosopher who turned to economics and history. It is not surprising, then, that some historians of political theory, many of whom are trained as political scientists and who constantly abstract political theories from classic philosophic systems, should prefer to call their work ‘political philosophy’. They are gentlemen and scholars and, within departments of politics, superior beings, if philosophers manqué. Why, for example, should they defile the world of pure political ideas by soiling their hands with the data of social and economic history? Why should they assess the possible bearing of the everyday life of numerous ordinary people on shaping


a classic political theory, or the impact of history from below on it? Better to explore – unsullied by mundane concerns – the ethereal realms of the great philosophers than to devote attention to far less philosophic thinkers, who, however, may have been just as influential, and in some cases more so. There seems to be a touch of hubris in all this, for is not the former preoccupation closer to the gods? And those who ground the history of political ideas in material conditions are dismissed as reductionists, in contrast to their own openminded, dispassionate, and objective scholarship. None of this criticism is intended to denigrate the substance of philosophy. I have only tried to suggest something of its style of thought, of which many philosophers themselves are probably quite unaware. At any rate, since my concern has been with outlining a model or ideal type, actual practice falls short of it. Nor do I wish to belittle the valuable contributions made by many who work within the philosophical mode. They dominate contemporary scholarship in the study of political theory. If, however, the study of political theory is to continue to thrive and advance, more attention in the future should be given to the historical approach that situates political ideas in their material context. Otherwise, the discipline may very well degenerate into scholastic disputation of a narrowly technical kind, with little relevance to thought and action in the twenty-first century. Fruitful new areas of inquiry may be overlooked, and exciting possibilities impeded. Very little movement in the historical direction, unfortunately, is discernible. The few scholarly commentators pursuing the historical approach are mainly historians whose treatment of political theory and theorists is only incidental to more inclusive interests.

5.2 The philosophical idealism of the Cambridge School These last remarks bring us to an interesting and influential version of the philosophical mode, which, however, describes its approach as historical and contextual. I am thinking of the form of discourse analysis – which I have labelled the ‘Cambridge School’ and to which my comments will be confined – launched by J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner.13 I shall sketch out in broad strokes what I take to be the essential characteristics that this varied group of scholars has in common. The efforts of the Cambridge School have left a deep


impress on the study of historical political theory throughout the English-speaking world and have yielded intellectual fruits of the first order. Besides numerous illuminating reassessments of political theorists done with finely honed conceptual skill, Pocock and Skinner, and their followers, have valuably emphasized the historicity of texts. (At least in Skinner’s case, the philosophical underpinning appears to be the idealism of R. G. Collingwood.) Language is seen as central to politics; indeed it is a kind of language game. Politics basically entails the manipulation and maneuver of linguistic signs, the tactics and strategy of their employment. Politics is largely concerned with ideas in abstraction, more or less isolated from their material contexts. From this perspective the position appears to be in the philosophical mode. The idealist predilections and assumptions of the type of historical enquiry employed by the Cambridge School are soon apparent. The text of a classic work of historical political theory must be contextualized, context referring to the greater ideational whole or tradition or ‘paradigm’ of political discourse with which the text being examined is associated. Once the text has been related to a specific paradigm, that paradigm is carefully fleshed out and reconstructed by studying the many minor authors of the time or before who have been responsible for its development. The heuristic problem, then, is to demonstrate how the conceptual language of the text conforms to or deviates from the formulations characterizing the paradigm. The more original the theorist the greater will be his or her deviation from the paradigm’s usage. Employing much of the language of the paradigm, the original thinker, however, gives it new meaning, a question of new wine in old bottles, with the result of revolutionizing the paradigm. Such an important paradigmatic shift may in turn be the basis for the formation of a new paradigm of political discourse, and so the process continues throughout Western intellectual history. The indebtedness to and parallel with the ideas of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) are clear. Through the application of such a procedure, the full meaning of the text and the intentions of the author will be recovered by the student of political theory, a procedure that stands in sharp contrast to an analysis from the standpoint of the commentator’s own values and assumptions or in terms of a contribution to one of the great perennial problems of philosophical discourse, both of which are anachronistic, the


cardinal sin in the view of this type of discourse analysis. While practitioners of this general mode of analysis seem to have given up the term ‘paradigm’ in favour of ‘tradition of discourse’, their methodological presumptions have not changed. Since the subject of the Cambridge School is historical political theory ideas are obviously central. From this standpoint history is fundamentally the history of ideas. Although the Cambridge School has made an unquestionable advance in methodological sophistication and historical rigour and research over what has previously been accomplished within that scholarly genre, the focus is almost exclusively upon the relationship among linguistic formulations. This kind of discourse analysis in an impressive way has nearly given to the traditional history of political ideas a ‘lateral’ and ‘collective’ dimension – by relating ideas to a tradition of usage. Nevertheless, the Cambridge School fails to come to terms with a crucial problem which plagues any history of ideas approach. In addition to the mutual relationship and interaction of political ideas, they also have social, political, and economic referents in the world of human existence. Except by relating political theory to particular political episodes like the Engagement controversy or the Exclusion crisis, the Cambridge School seldom examines in detail and depth the precise nature of the interrelationships of the political ideas with the realities of human activity. It is almost as if these episodes themselves represent discourses, although on a different plane from scholarly controversies. Even what appear to be not simply historical episodes but long-term social or economic developments, such as ‘the rise of commercial society’, are defined largely in terms of discursive paradigms. Their failure to socially contextualize political ideas would seem to follow naturally from the view that politics is fundamentally linguistic. The corollary is that political theory consists of words (paradigms) about words (texts) about words (politics). In a number of ways the work of the Cambridge School seems to be at least as philosophical as it is historical. More precisely it is the application of something of the intellectual style of philosophical idealism to the history of political ideas. Some form of idealism is the not so hidden hand guiding and informing the Cambridge School. First, as we have seen, the emphasis is always on language, linguistic usage and meaning, the interrelationship of concepts. The contextualization of a text requires situating it in a greater linguistic whole – the


paradigm or tradition of discourse – assessing the relationship of the textual language to the language of the whole. The relatedness of part – the text – to whole – the linguistic paradigm – and the determination of the coherence or incoherence of the one with the other resembles the kind of philosophical idealism found in Plato. The parallel with Plato’s idealism is by no means exact, but the similarities and differences are worth brief attention because of the light they may shed upon the assumptions and procedures of the Cambridge School. A specific sensible phenomenon is thought by Plato to be a representation of the ideal form which is a component of the greater non-sensible sphere of ideal forms. The plurality of sensible particulars – the many texts of the Cambridge School – can only be understood by reference to the greater whole of ideal forms – the paradigms of political discourse. To know a specific sensible phenomenon – or the text – is to relate it to the world of ideal forms – a paradigm or tradition of discourse – and to ascertain its coherence or incoherence with the greater whole. The world of ideal forms for Plato, of course, can only be constructed in the first place by our perception of the particulars of sensible experience, just as the nature of the paradigm in discourse analysis requires the examination of the many texts whose linguistic usage is the foundation of the paradigm’s structure. So the procedure involved in Plato’s idealism and the idealism of the Cambridge School is essentially circular. Plato’s metaphysical reality of the world of ideal forms, providing an understanding of the universe of sensible particulars, depends upon an initial perception and appreciation of the sensible particulars. In the Cambridge School, similarly, the construction of the paradigm depends upon an intimate knowledge of the many texts to be referred back to the paradigm, extracted or abstracted from the linguistic usage of the texts. The paradigm is, in fact, a nominal inference from the ‘data’. Some of the differences between the two species of philosophical idealism are also worth noting. To begin with, for Plato there is only a single world of ideal forms, constituting metaphysical reality, while for the Cambridge School there may be several paradigms that illuminate the meaning of the different relevant texts. Furthermore, the paradigm is always in the here and now, that is, it is the analyst’s construction out of the linguistic formulations of the texts of a historical period. In contrast, the Platonic greater whole is transcendent,


possessing neither temporal nor spatial existence, while the particulars of sensible experience have a temporal and spatial dimension in the past, present, or future, as the case may be. The particulars for the Cambridge School – the texts out of which the paradigm or tradition of discourse is fashioned – are always one remove from sensible experience, since they consist of linguistic signs of that experience. It is arguable, of course, that the text of political theory is just as close to the sensory particulars of the past as the Platonic perception of past sensible particulars might be. For what do we know of the sensible particulars of the past except through language, the historian’s reconstruction of the past through all sorts of written documents and records? So would it not be correct to say that when dealing with the past the sensible particulars of Platonic idealism and those of the Cambridge School have a similar epistemological status? The difficulty with this conclusion, however, is that upon closer examination, the particulars of the Cambridge School, always entailing as they do the mediation of sensible experience through language, appear in fact to be a greater distance from sensible experience than the Platonic particulars, even those of the past, which seem more immediate than mediated. In this respect, then, as we shall see, the idealism of the Cambridge School seems more idealistic than Plato’s idealism. Let me try to explain what I mean. From the vantage point of the Cambridge School, our knowledge of the past, for example seventeenth-century England, largely rests on language and our own linguistic interpretation of that language. The texts of political theory – Hobbes, Winstanley, Filmer, Harrington, Locke, Sidney and numerous others – are themselves part of the written records of the period, and therefore are the sensible particulars out of which several paradigms might be constructed. Even the written documents chosen by the Cambridge School tend to be narrowly selective, the writings of elevated intellectuals, or perhaps the disputations of major political actors, but little evidence of popular discourses and practices. But is all we know about seventeenth-century England conveyed only, or primarily, through language: the written records, and accounts of participants and witnesses of the events and actions of the century? If we had to rely solely on language in the form of such written documentation, our knowledge of past times would be rather meagre.


Consider the exceedingly rich sources of a non-linguistic kind that we have about the lives and relationships of seventeenth-century English men and women: archaeology, architecture, paintings and graphics, sculpture, music, costumes, tools, agricultural and manufacturing equipment and implements, household goods and furnishings, traditional practices, and a variety of commodities. Valuable as they are in themselves for understanding seventeenth-century England, these non-linguistic sources are a prime means of gaining access to English reality, of getting behind the linguistic sources to what all types of English people were doing – their work, plans, intentions, ideals, needs, and desires. The non-linguistic sources do not simply serve to frost the cake of written evidence, for when joined with that evidence they inform us in minute detail how life was lived and what it was like. My approach up to this point and subsequently raises serious epistemological questions that can only be treated in the briefest fashion here. As a philosophical realist and empiricist I believe that a basic reality exists ‘out there’ independent of ourselves. This I am convinced is the inescapable inference from our own sensations. Our language consists of signs of the things in this reality, signs obviously mediating ourselves and structuring the nature of our perception of reality, to what extent we shall probably never conclusively know. We should, of course, not assume on the one hand that language exactly mirrors external reality or that on the other hand language is the sole reality. What exists out there independent of the words and thoughts of the individual probably can never be determined except in an absolutely vital negative sense. In our day-to-day lives we must always act as if an external reality independent of our own existence does in fact exist. If we do not, then we render ourselves completely helpless, incapable of survival. In all ordinary practical situations, much less those of a catastrophic nature, we must act if we cherish our lives and well-being, as if there is an external reality testified to by our sensations. Prudence and common sense dictate, even against our deepest intellectual convictions, that we must so act. The as if of the existence of an external reality independent of ourselves is the supreme epistemological imperative of politics and the political world. To act otherwise is to act at our own peril, for politics is an arena in which crucial life and death and bread and butter issues are constantly at stake. Perhaps these rather sparse comments will not


satisfy the discriminating analyst, but since my self-imposed task is to convey some impressions of political theory (and politics) rather than to engage in abstruse epistemological debate, these few remarks must suffice. Why is any of this relevant to the study of political theory? A shortcoming of the Cambridge School is its restriction of a text’s meaning to language and linguistic contextualization, so that much of politics is taken to be language. I have previously argued (Chapter 2) that politics is about vital human relations in real life situations. The linguistic signs are not in themselves the primary or ultimate reality. They are expressions of various social, political, and economic realities, of the material world. The study of a text must take into consideration much more than its linguistic context since much of the language employed has empirical referents, signs standing for real things ‘out there’ in the material world. The Cambridge School seems to be saying that we have no access to these underlying realities, or that they are unimportant, or that they themselves are determined by the discourses. Non-linguistic symbols may also be significant in understanding a text. A wealth of human experience is encapsulated in the nonlinguistic sources. It is not that reading a text in light of a particular plough or mill or portrait will itself lead us very far in textual study. But knowledge of these non-verbal sources helps to reveal the world of practice and to identify the crucial context to which a text is related. Obviously written evidence is indispensable for such an appraisal, and so it is true of politics in general. Politics, however, is not a matter of language alone. In one way or another politics affects the lives of all, directly or indirectly, and what all of us do in our practical lives in turn affects politics. Finally, comparison with the Platonic archetype of idealism illustrates a further difficulty with the work of the Cambridge School. Plato’s metaphysical world of ideal forms is obviously impervious to time, the changeless reality behind the flux of sensible appearances. This latter realm, however, despite its constant change and variation seems basically static. The referents of the sensible particulars are always the changeless ideal forms, the multifarious many representing the enduring few. Furthermore, there seems to be no fundamental direct relationship of sensible particular to sensible particular, for each is mediated in regard to the other through the unchangeable


ideal forms. The sensible world, in short, consists of particulars with little or no apparent causal linkage and no very clear process of change. Despite the fluctuations and continuous change of the world of sensible particulars, we witness an essentially static scene, lacking in dynamic interacting process, devoid of historical change. Such an interpretation seems to be confirmed by Platonic idealism’s coherence criterion of truth which obstructs any fundamental notion of historical process and change. We are confronted simply with a temporal succession of discrete particulars, atomistic variations on the single theme of the relationships to the ideal forms. In a way this antipathy of Platonic idealism to historical change and causal process relating past, present, and future, is replicated in one of the typically postmodern features of the Cambridge School. When the words of the text in historical political theory are related by the Cambridge School to practical politics and government, it is often in an ‘episodic’ fashion, as in Skinner’s treatment of the Florentine context of Machiavelli’s thought or of Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy.14 The full sweep of history, the interconnection of ideas with long-term social, political, and economic forces and trends ordinarily remains unexamined and unappraised. We are exposed, instead, to the fragmentation and atomization of history, its break-up into discrete, almost self-contained segments, with very little explanation of their relationship to what went on before or what was to follow.15 Or at least this is the impression often conveyed to the reader. Obviously for heuristic reasons, it is necessary to sever the seamless web of history, but the Cambridge School often fails to explore how the fragment, thus isolated and evaluated, results from past circumstances and contributes to future change. Perhaps this essentially static and atomistic conception of history is due to the idealistic assumptions (often unconscious and unrecognized) of the Cambridge School: its linguistic reductionism, constant referral of texts to linguistic paradigms, and failure to emphasize the interconnection of ideas and the material world. Admittedly, the theorist under examination cannot be aware of the future. But this indisputable fact does not prevent the analyst today from being constantly attuned to what comes before and after a text, thus carefully situating it in the process of becoming without committing anachronism or distorting the author’s meaning. The problem with the Cambridge School is that it seems more philosophical than historical. By its fixation with language and


linguistic formulations, it threatens to isolate the classic text in political theory from the sphere of action and practice, from the developing material world of sensible experience. A text was written to contend with real, concrete political and social problems, not simply to amend, forward, or transform received ideas and concepts in an autonomous realm of ideas.16 The best antidote for the philosophical idealism of the Cambridge School, despite its many valuable interpretive contributions, is an increased recognition of the material world of society and politics and a greater acknowledgement that life is much more than language, and that politics, historical and contemporary, involves much more than verbal signs.

5.3 Philosophy without history or philosophy and history? While the discourse analysis of the Cambridge School may be more philosophical than historical in the ways just discussed, at the same time it at least retains the semblance of historicity, and in numerous instances is clearly historical. This, however, is apparently not the case with purer forms of the philosophical approach that see the fundamental objectives to be clarification of the internal meaning of a text, establishing the logical relationships among concepts, identifying inconsistencies in the argument, and revealing illuminating insights which may be of analytic value today. In an almost self-conscious fashion the effort is made to eliminate history from the examination of texts as if it were of slight relevance to the explication of language and conceptual analysis. Confine the texts to the undefiled realm of ideas, separate them from history, purge them of any historical residue, and their meaning will be extracted by painstaking linguistic evaluation. One gets the impression from such analytic projects, although not in so many words, that philosophy is intellectually superior to history, somehow more detached and objective, and that philosophers compromise their integrity as dispassionate analysts by exploring the historical roots of texts. Traces of the ivory tower syndrome still persist. The poverty of such a philosophical mode of studying historical political theory is illustrated by the fact that its proponents can never completely escape history in spite of their rejection of historical analysis. For in the explication of a particular text history in various


ways is always admitted by the back door. Most obviously the text to be analyzed must be related chronologically to the works of other political theorists. Plato wrote before Aristotle, Aristotle before Hobbes, and Hobbes before Hegel. Few philosophical analysts are so foolhardy as to proceed as if Aristotle were writing in the eighteenth century and Hume in the fourth century BC. The same must be done, moreover, in reference to works of a single theorist. The student of political theory never treats Plato’s Republic as if it were written after the Laws, nor Hobbes’s Leviathan as if it predates De Cive. It may be helpful to know whether the parts of a theorist’s work were written out of sequence, for example, Book II of More’s Utopia before Book I. What time elapsed between the writing of the parts, why this was the case, and how, if at all, does the fact affect our interpretation of the whole? By the same token, the exact dating of a work, for instance, Locke’s Two Treatises, together with the textual differences between the original composition and the later published version may be of importance. In addition, the analyst can never afford to disregard the historicity of language, of metaphor, imagery, references, examples, illustrations, concepts, categories, and methodologies. Classical Greek is no longer a living language. Latin is increasingly confined to a few, nor is sixteenth and seventeenth-century English identical with modern usage, presenting today formidable obstacles to understanding among many readers. In each case the analyst must refer to the historical meaning of words, phrases, and ideas – often by way of translation – and must identify names and events in order to establish the meaning of the text. To treat the polis of the Socratics as if it were the nation-state of Hegel or Mill is to misunderstand a matter of fundamental import in reading a text. And so it is true of the countless terms whose meaning is taken for granted in the late twentieth century: democracy, representation, sovereignty, federalism, property, freedom, equality, people, servant, trust, and consent. At this point, then, it should be apparent that a philosophical analysis of a text, if it is to be worthwhile, must entail historical perspective and reference to the immediate historical context of the theorist. But the philosophical analyst no doubt will reply that all this is true, and when these matters are considered and acted upon, the project can continue as before. Nevertheless, in addition to the patently obvious observations made above, historical understanding must play a far greater role if justice is to be done in reading and ascertaining


the meaning of a text in political theory. How are we to recognize the unexpressed assumptions, values, and beliefs taken for granted by the author and his contemporary readers and consequently never explicitly articulated in the text, unless we know something in detail about the historical context? The same may be said about the significance of the social types, the heroes and anti-heroes, put forward by the author. Does the theorist distort or misrepresent a fact or the idea of another author, and if so, why? Without some knowledge of the author and the historical context, how do we know whether passages of the text are ironical or satirical? Before we can determine whether something of novelty or theoretical importance is being enunciated we must be familiar with the intellectual world as part of the historical context in which the author is writing. Does the form or order of the text have any special significance? How is the relative value of each line and proposition of the author to be judged except through historical and biographical research? Otherwise a text would be read as if all the words, phrases, and statements were on a par. In other words how are the emphases of the text to be identified unless consideration is given to the life and times of the author? Frequency counts of words and themes may simply distort the meaning. Furthermore, it would seem to be vital in reading a text to know the circumstances of its composition, something about the author’s intellectual and political friends and foes and the nature of the immediate audience being addressed. Perhaps most importantly, how can we ever grasp the relationship between thought and action, deal with past theories as any more than sterile abstractions, and ourselves create meaningful guides for contemporary political practice unless we link what the classic theorists had to say with the concrete historical circumstances in which they said it? One mode of philosophical analysis, subject to these criticisms, is the construction of conceptual models abstracted from the texts of different theorists writing over a considerable time span, for example, natural rights and utilitarian models. This can be an illuminating enterprise as long as it is remembered that the models are abstractions from historical reality, from specific theories created in specific historical situations, and that in constructing the models what is left out, of a specific historical nature, may be crucial to understanding the theories. Once the many answers to crucial questions regarding the specific theories abstracted in the models are included in the


models themselves, they cease to be models. Ultimately the questions require historical answers about specific texts situated in their relevant historical contexts. Construction of conceptual models can be an interesting and useful heuristic exercise, only, however, if it is remembered that they are not substitutes for the historical appraisal of the theories themselves. Once the value of the manifold ways of reading a text is admitted, the floodgates of history and historical analysis are raised. No longer can it be maintained that philosophical analysis is separate from historical analysis, or at best that the latter is a very junior partner of the former. Instead, the very contrary can be argued: any sound philosophical analysis of a text must be grounded in historical contextualization; the latter is the foundation of the former. At the most mundane and elementary level, would the philosophical analyst of political theory take the same ahistorical liberties in determining the meaning of a speech of a major politician today? Imagine trying to understand the significance of the pronouncements of Blair, Bush, Chirac, or Putin out of the context of what is happening in the contemporary world and what has occurred since the Second World War. Unless the evaluation is to verge on the nonsensical or the irrelevant, the analyst must bring to the task a wealth of historical knowledge and understanding, both conscious and unconscious. Reading the text of a political theorist out of its appropriate historical context has serious intellectual consequences. By approaching a work in this way we tend to overlook the fact that we are observing the author as an individual of faith, emotions, passions, commitments, follies, and foibles, in other words, as a living human being who wrote with certain intentions and purposes, a partisan in an arena of social and political turmoil. The result is that the text is sterilized and neutralized, and the theorist, in essence, is dehumanized. To forget, moreover, that the thinker being studied was in one way or another usually an active partisan who marshalled all his considerable intellectual talents and resources to argue in a text for a specific course of action for his own time, is essentially to depoliticize it. With what sense of immediate practical urgency are the ideas of a theorist conveyed to the reader in much of the philosophical commentary on political theories? Do we ever clearly recognize that from the standpoint of a theorist fundamental social and political issues of the utmost urgency are often at stake, that vital interests


may be on the block, that a valued way of life may be in jeopardy, or that a promise of the future must be realized? Finally, by examining a text in political theory with little or no attention given to its historical context, it is studied almost as if it were written in our own time. We approach it from our own historical vantage point, bring to it our own time-bound values and assumptions, with little or no appreciation or knowledge of the past. At the very least, in analysing a text, the failure to take into account the basic differences occurring in the historically developing state and in the large problems of politics over the centuries reflects a singular hubris and even ethnocentrism. Such kinds of analysis become in themselves ideological in a fundamental sense. Paradoxically, we radically historicize texts in the most unhistorical manner, by simply dehistoricizing them. They are virtually transformed from living political works into passive vehicles for the expression of our own values and intellectual interests, to be exploited at our own will and to serve our own ideological purposes. If one of the chief aims of reading the texts of historical political theory is to help in freeing ourselves from our own unexamined assumptions, then we cannot afford to dehistoricize them, simply appropriating them for our own devices. To do so is to deprive political theory of its humanizing and liberating role in our own lives, its rich capacity to generate critical and creative thinking in the present. Philosophical enquiry alone, without the guiding and informing hand of history cannot make a very profound contribution to the study of political theory.

6 Historical Mode of Analysis

The historical mode of analysing political theory assumes that the meaning of a classic text can be established only if it is firmly situated in the appropriate social, political, and economic context and the relationship between the theorists’ realms of ideas and the world of action in which they lived and wrote is carefully defined. The logic of ideas must always be securely tied to the logic of practice, to the everyday life of the age, to the turmoil of the political forum and the hustle and bustle of the market. Far from neglecting the internal assessment of the text, the historical approach requires that each step of the analysis is informed by what can be discovered about the concrete activity of the period. Because ideas and actions are mutually dependent and interpenetrating, forming a seamless web, history should never serve as mere background to a political theory in a static and lifeless way. Theorist and theory are essential and integral components of the historical process. To separate the two is to obscure and distort the nature of history, human creativity, and the ideas of the theorist. The basic objective of the historical mode is to explore the connections between the ideas of the theorists and the material conditions of their society, in essence the social history – construed in a broad way – of those ideas. The ideas should be embedded in their social matrix, associated with what was occurring in the social universe. If the meaning of the theories is to be ascertained, the question to be asked is how the theorists’ ideas relate to the structure of their society, the nature of its government and law, the crucial political conflicts, and the system of class and status. Since politics in reality 115


cannot be divorced from economics, an historical examination of a political theory must go beyond relating its ideas narrowly to formal governmental arrangements. A whole range of questions must be asked in order to understand the connections between the political ideas and their economic context. What, if any, is the relevance of production, property relations, and the division of labour to the appreciation of the political ideas? How does each of these factors in relation to the others help to elucidate the theorists’ realm of ideas as an interconnected whole? How is this totality of ideas and actions, in turn, related to what went on before in the society and what was to occur in the future? This kind of analysis may rescue the study of political theory from stale antiquarianism and sterile abstractionism by restoring the text to where it was conceived and belongs, to the historical process, one of constant flux and change as well as stability and continuity. When so approached, the text is reinstated as a dynamic and living element of history, a meaningful and vital constituent of the ebb and flow of civilized life. Thus, the historical mode should always be sensitive to the historical process, showing how it is reflected in a text and the role of the text in the process. A text and its ideational and material contexts are not isolated fragments, but integral, connecting links between past and future. History is not a chronological sequence of self-contained episodes or autonomous occurrences, but a dynamic causally interrelated movement of practices and ideas from their bare beginnings to their disappearance from the human tableau. This view results from the scrutiny of the past from the vantage-point of the present and does not entail a teleological conception of history involving the inexorable direction of all events toward a predetermined end. Because current practices and ideas often originate in the past and evolve to their present state, we can situate them in a historical process, such as ‘the rise of capitalism’, without being teleological or anachronistic. Without such an approach to many past practices and ideas, we may very well obscure and even obliterate our connection with the past and hence our understanding of the present by severing their link with us in failing to identify the process by which they undergo change. A prime reason for understanding political theories historically, as integral parts of the historical process, is to illuminate the present. In this chapter I shall try to deal with several questions of a fundamental nature raised by the historical mode of analysis. First, what

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relative weight is to be given to the influence on a text of the received ideas of the political theorists as against the material conditions of his age? Are those conditions more important in shaping the text than the ideational screen through which the theorist perceives reality? Secondly, if the understanding of a text depends on contextualizing it, especially in terms of material conditions, are we not so relativizing it to the particular historical situation in which it was conceived that we deprive it of any universal value? Is a text little more than the ideological expression of the theorist’s material interests and partisanship, limited by the circumstances in which he or she was writing? If this is the case, then what possible lasting significance does the text possess? What transhistorical meaning can the text convey to us?

6.1 Ideational and material realms The ideas of a political theorist in every period both reflect and comment on its concrete activities and arrangements. A cautious assessment of the ideas as reflection and commentary brings the world of practice into sharper focus. As with all historical documents, of course, allowances must be made for the way a specific thinker’s ideas provide access to the contemporary historical situation. They may be less a mirror than a distortion of the circumstances to which they respond, encapsulating the theorist’s personal interests and prejudices. The reflection and commentary are also mediated by numerous ideas and concepts, with different emphases and in various combinations becoming an integral component of the unconscious mind-set or perceptual apparatus of the theorist, an ideational screen through which segments of social and political reality are structured. Each theorist both consciously and unconsciously creates his picture of reality through a rich legacy of ideas inherited from other thinkers, living and dead, and in so doing transcends them, discovering something about reality hitherto unrecognized. Plato’s view of his context was thus mediated and shaped by notions derived from studying Heraclitus, Parmenedes, and Pythagoras. Hobbes conceived of his world through the refracting prism of Thucydides, St Augustine, Galileo, and Lucretius. Marx arrived at his interpretation of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism through the speculations of Hegel, French socialists, and British political economists. Political


theory, therefore, must be examined within its immediate historical context moulded in part by inherited notions held selectively and possibly modified by a thinker. In every case the architecture of the new vision may depend on an original synthesis of received ideas, but the building materials out of which the edifice is fashioned consist of historical practice. Rigorous analysis of a political theory, therefore, cannot afford to neglect either context: mediating ideas or historical practice. The realm of historical practice, nevertheless, appears to be primary in a significant sense. The material conditions of a society – its political and cultural institutions and arrangements, economic way of life, and social structure – furnish the thinker with the unmediated stuff of his theorizing and with the range of problems and questions to be addressed, those arising out of the urgent practical exigencies affecting the daily activities of a people, however defined. Political theories are not created within an existential vacuum but are about social reality. A set of interrelated political ideas is not solely a response to received ideas, but a perception, ordering, and understanding of a portion of social reality through the aperture afforded by those ideas. The queries raised and solutions proposed in the theorist’s project are in reaction to the serious troubles of individuals whose lives are substantially shaped by the political, social, and economic framework within which they participate as real actors. Fashioning the stuff of practice, endowing it with order and meaning, initially depends on the theorist’s immediate life-experience. This notion of ‘life-experience’ is not meant in any profound psychological sense, but in the very matter-of-fact, down-to-earth way of participation from birth to death in an intricate web of human relationships, often of an involuntary nature. After all a political theorist is not a neutral observer; he or she is an actor on the historical scene. Response to the swirl of practical activity in which the theorist participates is in the first instance direct, unmediated, elemental, and even visceral. As witness and participant, a theorist knows and experiences – as the case may be – security, comfort, affluence, poverty, hunger, hardship, well-being, joy, fear, anxiety, anger, loneliness, hardship, and despair. All result mainly from the material conditions of the actual historical world. Wealth and luxury, leisure and physical labour, health and disability, penury and starvation are not mere mental states. The particular intellectual response of a theorist is shaped by living and


acting in the immediate historical arena, a specific location and time in social space, and by the advantages and disadvantages in occupying or changing that position. From this perspective Aristotle is not Cleanthes; nor Montesquieu or Hume, a Winstanley or Rousseau. Each theorist will react differently, depending on a different mode of life in a different social context. To cite two brief examples from sixteenth-century England. Thomas More was acutely aware of the social and political life of his age and apparently profoundly worried by the dangerous tyrannical potential revealed by the actions and utterances of Henry VIII. More’s intellectual response was the construction of Utopia as an ideal type that would provide orientation and guidance for practical reform and the resolution of the problems raised by the social and political life which he witnessed and of which he was a part. His project was inspired, informed, and shaped by ideas gleaned from Plato, Cicero, St Augustine, and Erasmus. Over three decades later, a farmer’s son, Sir Thomas Smith, who rose to be vice-chancellor of Cambridge University and principal secretary of state under Elizabeth, was concerned by rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, not least by the problems arising from an incipient agrarian capitalism. He feared that they would result in widespread civil conflagration. He also evidently recognized and appreciated Tudor efforts in fashioning a more centralized and unified state. These material conditions together with his careful study of Aristotle, Cicero, and Machiavelli resulted in 1548 in a bold transformation of traditional moral philosophy into an embryonic political economy and in the mid-sixties a conception of the state as an institutional whole. So we could go on with political theorists throughout the centuries. Despite the undeniably crucial role in shaping a political theory of the received ideational realm, it would seem to be secondary to the life experience of theorists and to the material world in which they lived. Admittedly, the ideational realm gives ultimate form to the stuff derived from practice and the final definition of the problems; helping to formulate the questions to be probed, their relationships, and relative weight; and serving to justify and authorize a particular understanding of reality and the recommendations for its refurbishing. But the prime impetus of the thinkers’ creativity and direction taken by the historical reflection and commentary of their ideas is due not so much to received ideas as to a direct life-experience in the


material world. The social and political reality of the thinker’s time generates and directs the theorizing response. It has become increasingly fashionable among students of political theory, for example, the Cambridge School treated in the previous chapter, to assign greater importance to the received ideational realm than to the given material sphere, often to the neglect of the latter. At the core of their argument seems to be the precept that social and political reality is mainly structured by our ideas. The proponents of such a view apparently dismiss a realism stressing the materialistic in favour of a methodology grounded on philosophical idealism and linguistic reductionism. Ideas are endowed, or so the reasoning seems to be, almost with an autonomy and purity largely untainted by reference to any dependence on material circumstances. How strange it is that in this way the cart should pull the horse, so to speak, since the very substance of political theory is the maintenance or modification of the material circumstances so summarily discarded. The attempt at defining the relationship between the context of social history (broadly construed) within which political theory should be situated brings to mind Stephen Werner’s brilliant effort to establish the connection between the text and plates of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.1 The 2,569 plates (in 11 of the 38 volumes, 1751–72) of that epoch-making work, according to Werner’s perceptive and searching analysis, were not simply intended by the editor to be supplemental background to the text in order to understand it better. Instead, the illustrations were thought of by Diderot as an obstetrix animorum, a midwife extracting from the womb of the text the living spirit of its ideas. Visually, the plates reveal the hidden world of French society. Many of them depict the ‘theatre of French life’, sometimes a ‘Hogarthian reality’, with all its social injustices. To appreciate the words properly, we must get behind them, to the scenes of life of people and their activities, no matter how mundane. Indeed, the words of the Encyclopédie are transformed by the directive genius of Diderot into the captions of the many illustrations. The superiority of the written word is eclipsed by the lives, machines, and activities portrayed by the plates. The reader is conveyed from linguistic universality to a world of concrete specifics and thus enlightened returns to the text. Moreover, the illustrations share some of the characteristics of a composite ‘blueprint’ suggesting the ‘idea of process’, the continuity from past to present and in an almost visionary way pointing to the future. Without the blueprint of the pictures,


the words of the text remain static and inert. It is brought to life by the animus of the numerous plates. As with the life-giving illustrations of the Encyclopédie, so the lifegiving context of social history in the broadest sense locates the ideas of political theory in the historical process, linking present with past, and affording a vista of the future. Far from reducing the ideas of political theory to a concern over discrete and isolated episodes, separate chapters in the story of mankind, or consigning them to a rarefied ideational atmosphere, situating them in their social context breathes life into the text, connecting it with the real world of human action.2 Such an approach to a text extracts from the words a fragmentary picture of what it was like to be an Athenian in Plato’s time or an Englishman during the seventeenth-century English Revolution. To contextualize socially a text in political theory enables us to get ‘behind the scenes’. Only then are we able to grasp and appreciate the social and economic implications of the political questions and prescriptions of the text. In this way the context allows us to explore the meaning of the text and to rescue that meaning from words about words, and instead to perceive it as words about real external things that impinge upon the daily lives of ordinary people. The texts of political theory can perhaps be most fruitfully conceived as captions (to employ Werner’s insight) to the pictures of the world revealed by social history in the broadest meaning. Social history, in fact, is the obstetrix animorum of political theory. What should be offered, therefore, in the analysis of political theory is not only the priority of the material world from the standpoint of the direct experience of the thinker, partly mediated by received concepts, but also something of the interplay between the development of the political ideas and the concrete historical context, between political theory and social and political practice, between thought and action. The complex task of the student of past political ideas, hence, is to penetrate and reveal this interaction and to explain the nature of the reciprocal relationship. Above all an examination of political theory within the context of practice should not relegate it to the status of mere background for the better understanding of the ideas. The context should not be conceived of simply as a finely wrought setting for the more effective display of the ideas. Rather, to change the metaphor, the world of social and political practice is the very foundation on which the edifice of ideas about that practice is built.


6.2 Questions of historicism and relativism A fundamental objection that will be made against this approach to past political theory is that it suffers from historicism. From this critical perspective a variety of searching questions can be asked to which answers must be sought. If a political theory is so firmly rooted in a specific context of social and political reality, how do we discriminate between political theories? Is not one theory as good as another, equally valid and true? Are we not caught in the web of radical relativism so characteristic of much postmodern thought? Since all theories are so closely connected with their historical contexts, what can we say of them by way of comparison, other than that they represent different and contending social and political interests and partisan positions? Moreover, if each political theory is so embedded in its particular historical context, so time-bound and spatially confined, what is its universal value? Where are its transhistorical elements and implications? Why bother to study and understand the great political theories of the past if their historical specificity prevents them from transcending their own time, place, and circumstances? Has not intellectual activity been so relativized as to eliminate all standards and criteria by which we ourselves can judge and act? By removing any permanent grounds for choice, do we not consign humans to the flux of extreme subjectivism and personal preference? Moreover, does not the logic of such radical historicizing of political theory mean that the approach itself is relative and historical? How can such a mode of analysis transcend the historically contingent and have any claim to universal validity? While these questions focus on the central problems of historicism and relativism, they tend to be rather extreme formulations of the either/or kind. The claim that all political theory is essentially contextual in the way I have argued does not radically historicize it in the sense suggested by such questions. At the most elementary level of understanding, my position assumes a certain commonness or universal quality in all human experience and more specifically among Western European peoples regardless of time or place, a certain sharing of those who have lived in the past with ourselves. We today share something of the day-to-day experiences of ancient Greek and Roman theorists, medieval churchmen, and the philosophes. Among many things, we are similar because of a common physical makeup


and all it implies and a dependence on society for security and well-being. The postulation of similarity does not ignore the very significant differences between previous generations and cultures and ourselves, but it does much to reduce the charge of complete and radical historicism. The radical relativism of postmodern types of ‘historicism’ is, in a sense, the product of its ahistorical quality, its linguistic idealism, its detachment from the material world and the concrete practical activity by means of which human beings sustain their very existence. Let us itemize some of the similarities in order to refine this notion of commonness. To begin with, whether ancient Greeks or twentiethcentury Canadians are being discussed, in a broad sense both share a common and familiar physical environment consisting of days divided between light and darkness, and a natural world of earth, water, sky, plants, and animals; of birth, life, sickness, decay, and death. Furthermore, humans in both past and present are of comparable physical make-up: they are born, eat, sleep, drink, feel, sense, reproduce, labour, and die, although even the most basic physical needs are always satisfied through specific socially sanctioned means. Over the centuries humans have created different cultures and ways of life in which language has been central. Each of the principal historical cultures has interpenetrated the succeeding one, for example in respect to practical techniques of living, leaving an important residue for the future. So the contemporary French like the ancient Roman know what it means to bathe, to sit on a piece of furniture or on the ground, to recline; to walk, to run, to swim; to plough to sow, to reap; to tie a knot; to boil water, cook meat or fish, weave cloth, carve wood, and so forth. Perhaps most significantly from our viewpoint, in each of the historical cultures in which political theory has arisen some kind of social division of labour has existed and with it a system of human domination and control – the state and politics – that have been the objects of human consciousness and self-awareness, and the subject for the reflections of political theorists. Hence, in spite of the historical specificity of political theorists like Aristotle and Locke, a definite commonness exists among humans transcending the immediate historical context, and rendering their political ideas intelligible and meaningful to succeeding ages. We are not solipsists totally isolated in respect to culture, ideas, feelings, and values from our forebears. We are all humans living in society as they


were humans living in society, sharing common experiences and states of feeling and appreciating common problems, although our social and political arrangements, perceptions, and attitudes may differ in many ways. So to emphasize the historical specificity of a past political theory should not imply that it is utterly alien, valueless, and incomprehensible to us living in a different situation in a different age. The past speaks to us with a voice that can be understood if we only take the pains to listen intelligently. Directly connected to this commonness is the question of context. If knowledge in general and political theory in particular as one mode of knowledge are related to their historical contexts or frameworks of reference, the meaning of historical context or framework of reference should be clearly established. Perhaps, instead of speaking of a specific context, it might be more accurate in each case to refer to a variety of contexts, and to knowledge and ideas as possessing different degrees of historical contingency depending on the various contexts to which they are related. For example to what historical contexts can we assign Plato’s political ideas? The most obvious one is the immediate Athenian context of his life-span, 427–347 BC. But it is important to remember that his own Athens was intimately related to Athens as it existed long before 427 BC and Athens as it developed long after 347 BC. Plato’s Athens in a way embodied all that occurred afterwards. Moreover, Plato’s political ideas can be related to even broader historical contexts, those of the various stages of Western European cultural development during which he has been read and understood by different generations and has influenced their thought and action. Plato’s ideas, therefore, are related differently to ever expanding historical contexts and to contexts within contexts. That his political ideas are directly related to the immediate context of Athens during his life-time certainly does not exclude the possibility that they are related to our own milieu, albeit in dissimilar fashion. It follows that many of his political ideas are not temporally and spatially limited, of relevance to his age alone and not to ours, although some of them may be. Historical relatedness in this sense does not imply any sort of complete relativism. Historical contexts are not separate, isolated, water-tight compartments. Despite fundamental changes and disjunctures, there is always continuity in the form of a residue of the past in the present, of persistent social and political structures and arrangements and patterns of human conduct. History,


of which ideas, values, and attitudes are an integral part reveals a complex dialectic of continuity and change, of permanence and flux. The Heraclitean river of history both changes and remains the same. The crucial point, however, is that Plato is related in disparate ways to a spectrum of historical contexts only through the specific context into which he was born. Again to stress the self-evident, it is worth remembering that he was man and thinker only by joining and leaving humanity at a specific time and place in history. He is and can only be related to us by virtue of his birth, activity, and death in Athens between 427 and 347 BC. Therefore, in order to determine which of Plato’s political ideas – or those of any of the other political theorists – are of universal value (not in any absolute sense, but only in relation to larger historical contexts) and which are related to their age alone, we must possess a rich understanding of the immediate historical context in which he lived, thought, and acted. What were Plato and the other theorists attempting to say and to whom were their reflections addressed? Under what social and political conditions were they saying it? Why and in whose interests were they saying it? So, to ascertain the trans-historical value of their political ideas – again not in any absolute sense – we must always in the first instance be concerned with the historical specificity of those ideas. In addition we should recognize that what may be of value in their political theories tends to vary from age to age, and we must ask why this is the case and whose interests are being served by the different emphases and perceptions in different periods of history. Their truths, instead of being universal in any absolute sense, transcend their immediate historical contexts to become related to greater historical contexts. Political theorists are able to transcend their immediate historical contexts not only because of what has been identified as a certain commonness of humans and the related persistence and continuity of some social and political arrangements and patterns of behaviour, but also for another reason. Out of the historical specificity of a political theory some things may be perceived in a new dimension, illuminated from a different perspective. The logic of a system of ideas energized by the theorist’s partisanship in the conflict of his age may very well generate, even without his awareness, novel notions and concepts that in the future become essential parts of fertile theories or stimulate fruitful lines of speculation. For instance, Aristotle’s distinction between natural and unnatural acquisition, between production


for use and production for profit, were made to justify a traditional agrarian, aristocratic society. In the hands of Marx this distinction was transformed into a conceptual weapon to understand and attack capitalism and to provide the theoretical basis for the idea of a nonexploitative society. Similarly, when divorced from its source of inspiration in the aristocratic notion of proportionate equality, Aristotle’s concept of distributive justice can be extremely insightful. Or Plato’s view that the economic division of labour, so basic to all human societies, entails in advanced social formations a hierarchical relationship of domination and subordination, when detached from his idea of the moral inequality of humans, may be pregnant with theoretical possibilities. A sophisticated and complex system of ideas, consequently, will secrete provocative and challenging insights that when abstracted from their original contexts serve as intellectual stimuli in the future or basic components of different systems premised upon different values. Political theory, however, is not solely a treasury of fruitful concepts to be selected for the purpose of building our own imaginative systems of ideas. Political theorists, as I have argued, are dedicated partisans who attempt to devise effective guides for political action. Theory and practice are a unity. They cannot be separated arbitrarily or simplistically by the abstraction of past concepts, and applied to contemporary conditions. If our rich historical heritage is to be of benefit in constructing theories of relevance for the urgent political problems of the present, then we must learn to appreciate the unity of theory and practice in the past, the relationship of ideas to the realms of political action within which they were conceived. Only by grasping the nature of the intimate connection between ideas and action in the past can we ever hope to relate theory to practice in a meaningful and useful way today. To do otherwise is to engage in sterile and scholastic exercise both in regard to past and present.

6.3 Role of ideology So far I have maintained that the historical mode of analysis gives priority to the immediate, practical political and social context over the influence of received ideas in determining the nature of a specific political theory; and that such relatedness to material conditions does not relativize the theory or deprive it of trans-historical value.


The notion of relatedness to an historical context or material realm of practice neither reduces a theory to subjectivism nor does it impede comparative evaluation. In the course of this book, however, reference has been made to the partisan proclivities of political theorists, their desires to move their readers to take or to refrain from particular kinds of action, and to the question of whose interests are served by that prescribed action or inaction. If theorists are not disinterested spectators of the political and social troubles of their times, then whose interests do they seek to promote, the advantage of what social groups, classes, sects, parties, or factions? These questions and their framework seem to suggest that political theory is little more than ideology. Does not such a reduction of political theory to ideology again simply relativize and subjectivize theory, relegating it to a statement of personal preference, and depriving it of any universal meaning and truth value? My argument, on the contrary, is not to identify political theory with ideology, but only to propose that the ideological component of theory is significant and not to be overlooked or lightly dismissed. Indeed, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the inspiration for theorizing and the shaping of a political theory (the generative dimension) seem to be fundamentally ideological. These contentions raise three problems. First, what is the meaning of ideology? Second, how does recognition of the important ideological component of political theory affect the historical mode of analysis? Third, does the significant ideological constituent of political theory diminish its status as an important form of knowledge? Definitions of ideology are legion. Instead of offering another formal definition, I shall proceed briefly and impressionistically by indicating something of what comes to mind when the term is used. Ideology is closely linked to action and mental orientation. An ideology consists of a view of the world shared by members of a social group – among them, states, nations, parties, classes, religious sects, occupational organizations, businesses, and voluntary societies – that induces them to act in certain ways and not in others. Some sort of psychological comfort and solace in often hostile environments is provided by an ideology, which customarily distinguishes between insiders and outsiders, friends and foes, the elect and the reprobate. The appeal of an ideology, usually only in part intellectual and rational, and often more emotional and irrational, is rarely based on scientific knowledge, and


is commonly expressed in simplistic sloganizing, by exaggeration and innuendo, in extreme black and white and either/or terms. Interest or advantage of some kind is the driving force of an ideology, which tries to rationalize or justify claims by the manipulation of a wide variety of symbols, and by argumentation that usually does not bear close intellectual scrutiny. Ideology assumes many forms. In addition to advancing the interests of a political party, ideology is used to promote the interests of a wide spectrum of groups: religious, national, ethnic, environmental, feminist, labour, business, farming, and professional. Any of these many groups may seek to forge links with politics, either through pressure tactics and lobbying, or through direct political organization. Or think of the ‘capitalist mentality’ that has so permeated and shaped human activity and outlook at all levels in our own advanced capitalist society. Politics is an activity permeated by interest and ideology. Interest in politics is not always economic, although an important economic component is usually present, if often subordinated to considerations of custom, tradition, sentiment, family, status, religion, nationality, and geographical locale. Whatever the interest may be, an ideology is usually developed to serve it, to win friends and oppose enemies. Those in an economically advantageous condition adopt an ideological stance that legitimizes and maintains their position. The materially less fortunate often seek to reverse the situation, to disrupt the social and economic status quo, and to take what they feel they have been unjustly deprived of. Ideology in these cases is bound up with class and status, and usually involves political organizations and programmes. Most adherents to political parties, leaders and followers, acquire in different degrees an ideological perspective. How then is the political theorist to be distinguished from the political ideologue, a Machiavelli from a Mussolini, a Hegel from a Hitler, a Marx from a Stalin? The theorist strives to convince an audience through complex argumentation, and is less concerned than the ideologue with stirring up the emotions and instincts of readers, with appealing to their loves and hatreds, with inciting them to direct and extreme actions often of a violent and brutal kind. Theorists are normally interested in fashioning coherent structures of ideas grounded in arguments drawn from psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, theology, history, and science. This style of thought is a critical part of the persuasive dimension of a political


theory (Chapter 3), and entitles it, perhaps more than any other trait to be a voice of reason in politics. Nor do the ideological elements of political theory mean that it is ordinarily characterized by an excessive use of emotive language, the wild distortion of fact, or the continuous and passionate exhortation to act barbarically and destructively. Action to change or conserve things, of course, may arise from the readers’ perception of the practical implications of the theorist’s argument. But the classic theorist strives primarily to influence and direct the reasoning of the reader, to stimulate thinking about problems of mutual concern, not to arouse unthinking fear and anger. Although the theorist may not engage in what is ordinarily called emotive or ideological discourse, the use of technical philosophical or historical analysis and of certain facts and examples, the omission of certain other facts and examples, the juxtaposition of specific arguments and facts and examples, may all, when put together, have ideological import. In addition, the theorist’s partisan commitment and class allegiance are sometimes well disguised as self-proclaimed universal truths. Finally, there may be ideological implications to the emphases of the text and its formal organization. In assessing the ideological component of a text, the lack of typical ideological discourse and approach may be misleading. Some might wish to characterize political theory as ideology for intellectuals, and ideology as political theory for the masses. At least such a gross oversimplification calls attention to the ideological features of political theory. But care should be taken not to equate simplistically political theory with ideology. How then does the acknowledgement of the ideological element of political theory affect our historical analysis of it? Aside from an awareness of the ideological ingredients of a text just enumerated, consideration should be given to the social and political interests it promotes. Does the theorist write (not necessarily consciously) to forward the material interests of a specific social group, class, status, sect, party, or faction? The determination of the specific interest he or she may be trying to advance can only be arrived at by probing historical analysis and may lead to a more profound and sensitive understanding of a text. Political theorists should not be treated as sacred cows, immune either to self-interest, or to forwarding the interest of a social group or class to which they belong or to which


they aspire. Political theorists are seldom if ever disinterested spectators. They often conceal their plea for a special interest in the garb of support for the common interest or good, and they may believe that this is the case. Interest, denoting good, benefit, concern, share, advantage, profit, is an old and universal word in Western European languages (interêt, interesse), derived from the Latin, interest or interesse, to be between or among, to be involved in or concerned with. The quest for power, influence, status, and wealth has customarily been at the heart of practical political activity, or to paraphrase Harold Lasswell, politics is about who gets what, when, where, how, and why. An examination of the reflections of theorists on politics, consequently, cannot afford to neglect the problems of interest, advantage, and profit. To absolve political theorists of any taint of interest would seem to entail some kind of terminological contradiction. How can a prescription for a well-ordered state possibly be free from interest? A crucial question, therefore, to be asked about a text in political theory is: whose interests are being served? This would seem to be an absolutely critical question about the politics of politics, a matter of common sense and practical experience. The credentials of the search for and identification of interest in politics is by no means confined to Marxists, although they have been prominent in this regard. Liberals as distinguished from the contemporary breed of neo-liberals for many years have raised the question of economic interest in politics and have sought through a variety of practical measures to check and control the activities of special interest groups in government and politics. At the beginning of the twentieth century the eminent liberal historian, Charles A. Beard, wrote the influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), in which he tried to show how various aspects of the basic law of the land reflected and promoted different economic interests.3 Whether we agree with Beard’s analysis or not – there have been many criticisms since he wrote – the enterprise was pioneering. Before and during the period in which he penned his classic, American progressives engaged in ‘muckraking’, creating a ‘literature of exposure’ aimed at revealing the graft and corruption of public officials and businessmen. If not the beginning of ‘investigative reporting’, these endeavours certainly gave it an impetus which continues to the present.


So in the examination of political theory the question of interest should always be raised and explored. The analyst should adapt the probing, critical attitude and procedure of the muckraking investigative reporter to disclosing the particular social, economic, and political interests of the theorists. Far from depreciating their status and value, this should aid in defining more precisely the ideological aspects of their theories. The technique, moreover, should help to reinstate political theorists among the living, treating them not solely as exalted intellects of a distant age, to be revered and deferred to, but as vigorous actors on the historical scene, subject to all the strengths and weaknesses of human beings. Think what a difference it would make if the great figures of political theory from Plato to Mill were approached in this way. The claim that an important ideological component characterizes historical political theories does not belittle them or detract from the universal value of some of their ideas. No more would it be to contend that the scientific theories of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton are invalidated by the religious and metaphysical beliefs and assumptions which sparked their brilliant endeavours. Although political theory may not be comparable to this pioneer science, nevertheless in both cases, without the ideological prime mover, there would probably have been no ultimate triumph of the intellect. Unlike science, however, ideology goes far beyond being simply the prime mover of political theory. In the case of political theory, the ideological impulse not only generates a configuration of ideas, but also gives it direction, shape, and form. Without ideology there would be no political theory. Although the two are not the same, they are inseparable. Political theory in a way mirrors what it is about, the state and politics, in which interest and ideology are driving forces. Strip state and politics of interest and ideology, and very little remains. Treating the greats of political theory as if they were above the fray is to distort and misunderstand their projects, to demean them as human intellects of the highest order. The foremost task of the historical mode of analysis, therefore, is to situate the ideas of a political theory not only in the received ideational realm, but also in their concrete political and social context, in the real material world, and to delineate the ideological aspects and interest oriented motive force of the theory. Only when this is accomplished can we identify the transhistorical value of the political ideas.

7 Marxism and the Historical Mode of Analysis

An important variation of the historical mode of analysing past political theory is Marxism. When employed thoughtfully and creatively it can be a fertile means of developing and advancing the historical approach hitherto outlined. Indeed, by now the reader should recognize my debt to Marxism in discussing the historical mode. So far I have stressed the systemic inequality of the state and the many injustices of governmental actions throughout history, and the fundamental elements of interest and ideology in state and politics. Emphasis has been placed on the value of contextual analysis, giving priority to social history and the material context. A text of political theory should not be perceived as an isolated episode in a chronological sequence of discrete events, but as a vital link between past and present in a dynamic historical process of change. Because the text is about the real world of state and politics, its connection with past and present can best be appreciated by relating it to the material circumstances in which it is conceived and to which it is directed. The text, in a significant sense, is a caption to the scene revealed by social history. Today, however, Marxism is assailed from all sides as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc, the decline of democratic socialism, the global triumphalism of capitalism, and the rise of the new nihilism of postmodernism. Nevertheless, there are recent signs of increasing recognition among non-Marxists of the perceptiveness of Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism. For example, John Cassidy has published a generally eulogistic article in of all places, that bastion of the establishment, The New Yorker, entitled ‘The Next Thinker: The Return of Karl Marx’.1 133


According to Cassidy, Marx was wrong about socialism but right about capitalism, and concludes: ‘Despite his errors, he was a man for whom our economic system held few surprises. His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.’ Among the spate of articles in popular journals in 1998 commemorating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, those written by non-Marxists also exhibit a more favourable evaluation of the authors and their ideas than one could have imagined. Serious Marxists have responded to the victory of capitalism and apparent demise of socialism by subjecting their beliefs to searching examination. Yet they have some reason for hope in their efforts once they recognize that paradoxically a great service to historical scholarship has been rendered by recent developments. For these changes have liberated serious Marxists from the fetters of party dogma, mechanistic orthodoxy, and governmental edict. Possibly today Marxists are freer than ever before to evaluate critically their intellectual outlook. So now Marxist scholars are in the enviable position of being able to reassess the Marxist theory of history, of recreating it in an open-ended and flexible fashion as a powerful instrument of historical analysis. Likewise, Marxists have an unprecedented opportunity of examining political theory and making a valuable contribution to its study. But Marxists, for a variety of reasons have sometimes seemed reluctant to pursue the systematic investigation of political theory. Perhaps the hesitation is in part due to the fact that Marx himself failed to construct a fully articulated political theory, although he evidently intended to do so. A more important explanation for their lack of interest in political theory is that Marxists have been less concerned with analysing past political ideas than with the immediate and urgent practical tasks of revitalizing socialism and socialist theory and with the struggle against capitalism and bourgeois ideology. Institutional factors have also played a part in the Marxist avoidance of political theory. The academic teaching of political theory – customarily taught in the English-speaking world in departments of politics usually conservative in outlook – has been since the end of the Second World War and still is influenced by Straussians in North America; and in Britain first by the students of Oakeshott and now by the Cambridge School. Given such hostile academic environments, it is not surprising that political theory should not have been a congenial subject for many Marxists.

Marxism and the Historical Mode of Analysis 135

Marxists, nevertheless, should have a far higher regard for the study of political theory than they have so far demonstrated. Marxism, if used in a flexible, open-ended, and creative manner, can make a valuable contribution to the study of past political ideas, just as it has to historical studies in general. In addition to the inestimable educational and cultural value of political theory, Marxists should be interested in preserving and forwarding a powerful historical legacy. More significantly, during a period when socialism and Marxism are experiencing a political and intellectual crisis, Marxists in their selfassessment may learn a great deal from the study of past political ideas and save themselves considerable trouble and difficulty. Since one of the first items on the current intellectual agenda of many Marxists is the construction of a socialist political theory for the future, the most obvious place to begin such an enterprise is with the careful and detailed examination of past political theory. Only by profiting from an intimate knowledge of the questions asked and by the solutions prescribed by political theorists will contemporary socialists be in a favourable position to begin and advance their own speculations. The study of political theory should offer indispensable intellectual orientation and guidance and prevent errors and misjudgments. So, among other things, this book is a plea for Marxists to pay more attention to political theory. It should not be dismissed out of hand as so much ruling class ideology or, as a manifestation of false consciousness. By studying past political ideas, Marxist scholars can further our understanding of history and strengthen their own theorizing today. If used critically and creatively, not as holy writ or immutable doctrine, Marxism can be a powerfully perceptive instrument for exploring the past. What then are the fundamental principles of the Marxist intellectual perspective that will facilitate its use as a valuable tool for examining the past in general and political theory in particular? I see the fundamental principles as four in number, to which the rest of the chapter will be devoted: 1. the salience of the economic, 2. history as dynamic process, 3. class structure and conflict, 4. the conception of the state.2

7.1 Salience of the economic Let me affirm at the very beginning that ‘salience of the economic’ at the core of the Marxist theory of history is not intended to suggest


that the economic is the sole causal factor in social life, or that the term is used in the crass sense of dollars and cents. The expression neither implies economic reductionism, nor economic determinism, nor technological determinism. My sole purpose is to emphasize the importance attributed by Marxism to material factors in historical life. ‘Salience of the economic’ simply denotes that from the beginning of time the human struggle to survive and live has involved cooperative social labour to meet physical needs, thereby setting the parameters in which the action and thought of a specific society occur and interact. As social labour of a cooperative kind slowly developed so did consciousness, language, and thought, always inseparable from human activity. When humans became increasingly conscious of their productive labour, their needs changed and enlarged, and so did their ideas. Humans were moved to modify their physical and social environment, thus giving rise to further needs, further changes in productive social labour, further environmental alterations, and further ideas. In this endless process since the first appearance of humanity, thought and action interact and interpenetrate in an ever expanding degree of complexity. The social context consists of action inspired and informed by thought, and thought reacting to and being recreated by action, all within the framework of constantly altering material conditions. The dynamo of the social trajectory is the ‘economic’, the material conditions derived from cooperative, productive, social labour. Our constantly changing environment, changing needs, changing productive labour, and changing ideas, all in a totalizing and mutually integrated fashion decisively affect what we do and think at any given point in the historical continuum. As I have suggested by the preceding scheme of dynamic interaction of needs, labour, thought, and social environment, the Marxist conception of ‘economic’ basically signifies productive labour and its social organization. Labour entails the use of our bodies in a purposive and socially cooperative effort to survive and live. Eventually in the course of human development shelter and clothing are fabricated, fire is used for warmth and cooking, tools and weapons are made, animals are hunted, fish are caught, plants and animals are domesticated. These activities are fundamentally economic, involving various kinds of primitive technologies. Yet technology in the form of different types of tools, implements, artefacts, and weapons is not identical with what Marx seems to have


meant by the economic. At the heart of the economic, as he perceived it, is the social: the structure and organization of cooperative labour, and the nature of the social relationships of humans with each other and their interaction with nature. As the life of the species evolved, social labour developed through the changing modes of cooperative humans in their working practices. The ‘economic’ is fundamentally socialized by Marx. It is given a social dimension. The economic for Marx then has to do with the network of social relationships, the organization of productive labouring tasks between the sexes, between youths and elders within the sexes, between family units, between and within kinship groups, and eventually between social classes. These structures of social cooperation in the allocation of productive labour and conscious human practical activity are the crux of the economic from which arise the myths and ideologies created to support, authorize, and even to change them. This is the essence of the Marxist distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure, each interacting with and affecting the other in a continuous developmental process. From a Marxist perspective, technological innovation is not the essential factor in the development of human society. This on the contrary is a cherished liberal belief dating at least from, if not before, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). It has become the credo of twentieth-century liberals whether in the form of the primitive economic neo-liberalism of Thatcherism and Reaganism, or the welfare statism of social democrats. Such crude technological determinism should have little to do with Marxism, although Marx occasionally in his aphoristic fashion appears to give credence to it and today some Marxists tend to conflate it with the economic. History suggests that technological innovation and change, instead of being the generators of historical movement, are themselves responses to fundamental alterations in the nature of social relationships. Tension and conflict in the organization and structure of cooperative productive labour at any given time seem usually to account for technological innovation, at least in the modern era. Examples are the early agricultural revolution in England from about 1500 to 1700, and the industrial revolution. In each case fundamental structural changes in English society were in the process of occurring prior to the great technological breakthroughs. Pre-capitalist social relations did not require or encourage the revolutionizing of


productive forces. Capitalism, on the other hand, is distinctive in its need for increasing labour productivity by technical means. Technological innovation and change are not simply technological, the use of novel machines, tools, and techniques in a widespread fashion. For these very machines, tools, and techniques embody social labour. They depend upon certain new structures of social relationships in their production and use, upon changes in those relationships, upon alterations in rules – customary and otherwise – regulating those relationships, and upon new ideas and ideologies which emerge to justify and rationalize them. Technology, therefore, is more a broadly sociological than a strictly technical phenomenon, sociological in its origins, uses, and consequences. Machines, tools, and techniques, no matter how novel or widely employed, are counters deployed and moved by human beings in the constantly fluctuating interplay of social relationships.

7.2 History as dynamic process Marx was also concerned with the economies of changing historical societies. This brings us to a second major principle of Marxism: a theory of history as dynamic process and its fundamental conception of a series of successive stages, each stage characterized by a dominant mode of production. Marx and Engels did not spin their stage conception out of whole cloth. The idea of successive historical stages, each representing a distinctive economic way of life and each generated out of the preceding stage, had antecedents at least as far back as the thought of Locke, Rousseau, and David Hume. Adam Smith, however, in The Wealth of Nations (1776) gave the notion its definitive and most influential form. He identified four stages, each constituted by a specific mode of subsistence: hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial. According to Smith’s ‘logic’ of history, each stage develops out of the preceding one, each represents a progressive advance over the one before and an increasing degree of economic and social complexity. This conception, with the commercial stage as the present and most advanced one characterized by a high level of technology, became a canon of subsequent political economy. Marx obviously drew upon Smith’s theory, which by his time had become an accepted liberal convention. At least five obvious


differences, however, exist between Marx’s stage conception and Smith’s. First, Marx replaces Smith’s commercial stage with capitalism, and socialism becomes the final stage. Secondly, Marx redefines the economic in terms of the social. He socializes the economic in a way that Smith never did. Thirdly, as a consequence, Marx eliminates the technological determinism so characteristic of Smith and later liberal thought. Fourthly, Marx substitutes mode of production for mode of subsistence. He is far less concerned with subsistence per se than with the method of producing the goods necessary for subsistence. Finally, Marx unlike Smith stresses relations of exploitation and social property relations in his panorama of history. The result is Marx’s four stage conception of European history based on production – primitive, ancient, feudal, capitalist modes of production – with a fifth and final socialist stage, developing out of capitalist conditions sometime in the future. While Marx never completely clarifies his meaning of ‘mode of production’, it consists of what he calls the ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ of production. Broadly speaking, the forces of production include anything contributing to production: the raw materials employed in production, the means of production (the nature of the primary productive unit), the technology utilized in production, the social organization of the productive process (the form taken by cooperative labour). The second major component of mode of production, the relations of production, has to do with the system of property in a given stage, with how property is held and distributed. Basic to the nature of property and property holding in a society is what Marx terms the social relations of production, the structure of class and class relationships upon which the system of property depends, and the relations of exploitation. Fundamental social change occurs when, as Marx occasionally puts it in shorthand, the changing forces of production ‘contradict’ or conflict with the existing relations of production. Two general criticisms can be made of Marx’s stage conception. The first has to do with a misunderstanding of Marx’s position and can fairly easily be answered. The second consists of objections of a far more weighty kind which have resulted from the richness of historical scholarship since Marx wrote and which cast considerable doubt on some of his views of the past. Although these criticisms, as we shall see, raise obstacles to the use of Marxism as a useful method for studying the past, they are not insurmountable. Some pruning of


the dead branches of Marxism may be required, but in my opinion the trunk remains strong and healthy. The first type of criticism directed against Marx’s stage conception tends to centre on the charges that it is crudely materialistic, teleological, and deterministic. Marxism is not materialistic in any crude or literal sense. In effect Marx socializes the material and the economic. They have to do basically with social phenomena: the structuring of human relationships in the way that productive labour is organized at any particular historical moment. The charge that history is teleological and deterministic involves the accusation that for Marx all of the past is aimed toward a predetermined and final resting place. Marx makes it abundantly clear on numerous occasions that humans make their own history, but usually within the limits imposed by certain material conditions, that is by the type of cooperative productive labour at a given time in a given society. Moreover, Marx emphasizes ‘laws of motion’ specific to each mode of production, to each distinct social form, against some universal transhistorical laws. Marx’s view of history is clearly not teleological in the sense that St Augustine’s was: all history as a unilinear process working out God’s foreordained and predestined purpose for humanity. Marx’s theory can be called teleological in two ways, and these seem innocent enough. First, human beings, the actors and makers of history, are, unlike other animals, conscious, purposeful creatures. Secondly, Marx believed that on the basis of knowledge of the past, a pattern or logic of the historical process can be identified, but there is nothing inevitable about the process. The fact that capitalism creates the necessary preconditions for the development of socialism does not mean that the emergence of socialism is predetermined, for instance in the dim primitive past. Marx never suggests that his stage conception represents the only way the historical process could have taken place. This was in fact the way it happened, but it might have occurred otherwise. To be sure, every specific social form has certain minimal preconditions. Capitalism could not, for instance, have arisen on the meagre material base of hunter–gatherer society, and every society has its own internal logic that allows certain kinds of changes and not others. Ancient slave society did not of necessity have to generate feudalism; nor did feudalism have to change into capitalism, and in some cases did not. Throughout history, moreover, all kinds of states, societies, and civilizations have not been subject


to this process of development. There may be other roads to capitalism and others to socialism, but for the first time in history capitalism offers the possibility of the emergence of socialism. Whether socialism will ever arise from capitalism depends on what happens to it and the choices made by people living in capitalist society. In sum, Marx never postulated a predetermined historical unilinearism, nor has human history been subject to the inexorable logic of technology. Marx also never implied that the fifth stage, socialism, was the final end of history, the ultimate resting place of the historical dynamic. History, once socialism has been achieved, continues. Strictly speaking, for Marx the future socialist society is not a stage comparable to the previous stages: primitive, ancient, medieval, capitalist. Socialist history is really the beginning of history, and all before it is prehistory. With the advent of socialism, most oppression and exploitation will end, and for the first time humans will be in a position to become full masters of their own destinies. Socialism and the precise nature of socialist society, moreover, constitute an open-ended conception, which cannot be formally specified in detail. Socialism is not so much the end or culmination of the historical process as it is an historical beginning. Socialist society commences a dynamic historical process that may pass through phases or stages, all characterized by the elimination of exploitation. Since most human exploitation will have been excluded, class and class conflict eliminated, and every precaution taken against their reemergence the state as we have experienced it will be gradually replaced. The dynamic of the historical process under socialism and the generator of social change will slowly be transformed. Change, therefore, will begin to occur at a new level without the exploitation and the antagonisms and tensions so characteristic of presocialist history. The second kind of criticism of Marx’s stage conception cannot, however, be dispelled so easily. It can be reasonably argued that the stage conception represents the imposition of a fairly simplistic and crude set of taxonomic rubrics on a rich diversity of historical detail, resulting in a distortion of historical reality. Although Marx’s perception of history may not have done an injustice to the level of historical scholarship of his age, since then our broader knowledge of the past compels this negative verdict. Liberal French and British historians of the nineteenth century and the political economists


employed a roughly similar conceptual framework, but today it appears to amount to forcing historical data into a rigid and inflexible mould distorting much that actually happened. Take three examples – the questions of feudalism and of bourgeois revolution of particular concern to contemporary students, and that of the ancient slave mode of production – at the very heart of the Marxist view of Western European history. The feudal stage, according to Marx, was characterized by relations between lords and serfs. Classic feudalism, for Marx the archetype, was we now know largely confined to France with all sorts of variations and permutations throughout Europe, and in its prime form lasted for only four hundred years from about 800 to 1200. What of the free allodial farmers throughout the period? How do we situate the highly centralized English feudal state in Marx’s scheme and compare it with the parcellization of sovereignty in feudal France? What do we do with the early and late portions of the feudal stage? Where exactly do the transitions from antiquity to feudalism, and from feudalism to capitalism begin and end, and how do we characterize these transitional periods? On the basis of modern scholarship, it would seem that the transitions in both cases are longer than the actual stages of feudalism and of capitalism. We know that feudalism had roots extending far back into the Roman Empire, as far back as the end of the fourth century AD when slavery was in decline and the colonate was in the making. By 1600 feudalism was non-existent in England, yet England was then not a capitalist society and Britain only became an industrial capitalist nation in the nineteenth century. Let us leave the question of feudalism for that of bourgeois revolution, keeping in mind that Marx’s ‘bourgeois revolution’ argument was indebted to liberal historiography, although important tensions existed between the two positions. Virtually all scholars today, Marxist and otherwise, reject the position that the English Revolution of 1640–60 was a bourgeois revolution, a conflict between a royalist feudal aristocracy and bourgeois capitalist Parliamentarians.3 The facts simply negate this thesis. France and the French Revolution also seem to present a difficult problem for the Marxist historian. Just prior to the revolution, the number of serfs was relatively small, a feudal aristocracy had long since disappeared, and the productive sectors were not characterized by capitalism. The leading revolutionaries were not capitalists, although many were bourgeois in the traditional


meaning of a burgher class.4 In precisely what sense, then was the French Revolution a revolution of capitalists versus feudal aristocrats establishing a capitalist state? Furthermore, Marx’s notion of classical antiquity in terms of the slave mode of production is also problematic. His conceptualization, however, is neither better nor worse than the historical scholarship at his disposal. One problem is that Marx tends to conflate ancient Greece with Rome. Another and related problem is that the productive role of the free peasant small-holder in the whole of classical antiquity is neglected because of the paramountcy given to slaves and the slave mode of production. Much of agrarian production in Athens, in contrast to Rome, appears to have been in the hands of free peasant producers although the extent of slavery in ancient Athens and Greece as a whole should not be minimized.5 In Rome, unlike Greece, the great latifundia manned by slave gangs, domiciled in barracks, were concentrated in Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and Spain between 200 BC and AD 300. Even in these regions during the period the free peasant cannot be discounted as an important factor in agrarian production. Moreover, in the rest of the Empire throughout the period, in its most populous areas – North Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Macedonia – the agrarian labour of free peasants was probably more significant than that of slaves. The motor of ancient Greek and Roman history was perhaps not conflict between enslaved direct producers and free citizen appropriators (contrary to the common nineteenth-century view held by Hegel and a number of distinguished historians, as well as Marx and Engels), but among free citizens: between free peasant producers and landlord appropriators, and struggle within the latter class. Contention between slave producers and free citizen appropriators cannot account for fundamental change in Athens from the time of Solon to the rule of Demetrius of Phalerum, for the social turmoil after the Second Punic War to the end of the Roman Republic, and for the troubles in North Africa following the death of Diocletian. Nor can the lack of technological progress in the ancient world – whatever that precisely means – be blamed, as it is so often, on the widespread use of slave labour.6 Such a lack, if we are so entitled to label it, may have had more to do with the predominance in the productive sector of small craftsmen and peasant farmers content to pursue their callings in the traditional manner. Furthermore exploitation by surplus appropriation


was by no means confined to enslavement or even principally through it. Different other kinds of exploitation were probably more significant: surplus extracted from free producers in various forms, rents, taxes, tributes or military conscription. While the importance of slavery in classical antiquity should not be minimized, the use of the slave mode of production as the dominant mode obscures much that is absolutely critical to the historical dynamic and quite clearly distorts our view of the whole. What in general, then, is the value of Marx’s theory of history for current scholarship? At least two positive features should be stressed. First, Marx’s theory is significant because of his perception of history as a continual totalizing process of social development. Brought to the fore is the full sweep of history with the interconnection of longterm social, political, and economic forces and trends. From Marx’s standpoint history is not a series of discrete and isolated events, activities, and practice; or more or less self-contained episodes. History for Marx is not a realm of pure contingency, but a flux of causal relationships in which occurrences are interpenetrating and interconnecting. History possesses a dynamic in terms of the importance of the economic that casts light on the relationship of present circumstances to what went on before and what happens in the future. Fundamental structural transformations in certain periods can be explained to an important degree by reference to basic economic change. By tracing the roots of capitalism back to sixteenthand seventeenth-century England, for example, its first appearance in the agrarian sector may come to be recognized, and consequently other aspects of life in those times further illuminated. In doing so we are not guilty of reductionism or teleological thinking, but profiting from one vital mode of access to an understanding of the past. Providing Marx’s perceptive vision of history is applied in an open-ended, flexible, undogmatic, and creative fashion, we have at our disposal a healthy antidote for the particularism, localization, and atomism characterizing the postmodern tendencies of historical revisionism and some modes of discourse analysis. A second valuable feature of Marx’s theory of history, directly related to the above and despite my previous criticisms, has to do with the concept of mode of production. When that concept – especially if linked to a rigid and mechanistic stage theory – is defined and used in a crude and technologically determinist fashion, it should


be discarded. But when refined and made more adaptable to all that has been added to our historical knowledge since the nineteenth century, ‘mode of production’, conceived of in terms of social property relations and the relations of exploitation can be an exceedingly rewarding means of exploring and understanding the past. Of paramount importance is Marx’s emphasis on the historical specificity of every social form and its own specific dynamic. At the very heart of ‘mode of production’ and Marx’s theory of history is the idea of surplus appropriation. An often quoted passage in Capital focusing on the question of surplus appropriation reveals the very essence of Marxism in general and his theory of history in particular: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. … it is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis – the same from the standpoint of its main conditions – due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.7 A number of points should be noted in this remarkable statement. First, the idea of ‘unpaid’ surplus labour being ‘pumped’ out of the direct producers, determining the relationships of domination and subordination, of rulers and ruled, implies (Marx develops this explicitly elsewhere) exploitation. Secondly, the specific type of surplus appropriation, including the system of domination and subordination so basic to it, depends upon the prevailing form of cooperative productive labour. Thirdly, the nature of surplus


appropriation and of the relationship between producer and appropriator – the mode of production – is fundamental to the structure of a specific society at a given time. Finally, even though the forms taken by surplus appropriation may be similar in certain societies, those societies will differ because of different geographies, histories, and cultures. Every social form with its own unique dynamic is historically specific. Moreover, in this passage, as Marx suggests, is the basis of his dynamic theory of history, the conception of class and consequently of social change; and also a notion of the state as it relates to the basic social and economic organization of a people. So from a doctrine of surplus appropriation we can turn to two other essentials of Marxism: class structure and conflict, and the conception of the state shaped by class relations.

7.3 Class structure and conflict For Marx the generator of all history since the advent of class society is class and class struggle. Or to put it in the most elemental form, much of social change since the advent of class society has resulted from the exploitation of human beings and their resistance to exploitation: the conflict between exploiters and exploited, surplus appropriators and surplus producers. Marx defines class by one’s relationship to the means of production. At any specific time in history and in any particular society class and class relationships can be delineated by answering certain questions concerning the role and functions of individuals in the productive process. Who are the direct economic producers? What happens to their surplus labour? Who controls or owns the means of production: farms, workshops, manufactories? Class has to do with large numbers of persons, who by virtue of having similar positions in the system of social production, similar roles in the social division of labour, especially those of subordination and domination, possess certain common interests opposed to the common interests of other classes. The vital point about class is who appropriates the surplus labour of direct economic producers and how it is appropriated. Once the question of surplus appropriation is raised, the question of exploitation is on the table. To what extent does appropriation within the productive process mean exploitation both within and outside it? What is the method


employed for enforcing the appropriation of surplus labour and its distribution? How is it distributed? Who stands to gain and who to lose from its distribution? The appropriation and distribution of the surplus raise the problem of justice: ‘to each his or her due’. By way of illustration, take a simple agrarian society such as existed in ancient Greece and Rome. A substantial proportion of the population were peasants, direct economic producers of most of the necessities for the subsistence of their society as a whole. Some peasants owned their own land, some rented land or were share croppers, some both owned and rented lands. Above what is required for the livelihood of themselves and their families and their reproduction is their surplus labour. It is expended in various ways: rents to landlords, taxes, tributes, levies, and administrative fees. In addition, peasants have to buy commodities in the local market, the price of which includes a profit for the artisan or merchant, and may have to spend periods in active military service, furnishing the time away from their land without pay, and their food and weapons for the campaign. In these different forms the peasant surplus is appropriated. How is the surplus distributed? What does the peasant get in return? For his backbreaking toil on the land, his purchase of commodities, his loss of work and perhaps even his life in battle, does the peasant receive sufficient compensation for his life-long labour and sacrifice? He is the backbone of the community, and without his efforts society could not exist. Yet does he receive just reward for his crucial social role? Who principally benefits from the appropriated surplus of the peasant? Is it the peasant or the gentlemanly landlord and magistrate? Does the peasant have a decisive voice in the appropriation and distribution of his surplus? All these questions raise the critical problem of justice. Peasant citizens of Athenian democracy between 500 BC and 300 BC and possibly of republican Rome prior to the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, as poor as they may have been, were possibly less subject to the exploitation of landlords.8 But otherwise and elsewhere throughout the agrarian world – both past and present – the lot of the peasant has been quite different. Is it just that the landlord, who has inherited his landed property, should live a life of relative luxury and leisure, play a dominant part in the social structure of power and authority in contrast to the peasant’s subordinate role, and control the state institutions and administration of law, functions which ultimately depend on the work of the direct economic


producers? Should the few landlords instead of the many peasants have the fundamental decision-making power? These considerations raise the absolutely basic questions of exploitation and social justice so central to Marx’s conception of class. Class as employed by Marx should not be confused with other sorts of social groupings, with strata based on income or occupation. Income group is not identical with class. A high income stratum may include direct economic producers as well as surplus appropriators. Highly skilled craftsmen who are wage earners may receive greater annual incomes than owners of small workshops or farms. An occupational category should not be equated with class. A self-employed stone cutter belongs to a different class from the stone cutter working for wages. Classification by income or occupation refers to specific types of status groups. More generally, class should be distinguished from status, although today the two are often used synonymously. Status is usually concerned with consumption and life style, whereas class for Marx focuses upon exploiters and exploited. Status, unlike class, is often sanctioned by law, birth, or religion, and normally associated with special rights, privileges, and obligations. In addition to income and occupation, status differs from class in that it may also be determined by birth, education, and source of income. A status group is usually more unified and less heterogeneous than a class. Status in some societies coincides with class. Status can cut across class and in general may be so intertwined with social classes as to present an exceedingly complex social picture. Class, as we shall see, can exist without consciousness of belonging to a class. In contrast, status, at least as it has existed historically in the form of legally defined orders and estates, usually produces a high degree of consciousness because of its intimate relationship to privilege, honour, and prestige. Class from Marx’s perspective is not a fixed or static entity, but an ever-changing complex of social relationships among the members of a single class and between members of different classes.9 The existence of class, consequently, requires at least one other class, so that there cannot be a one-class society since it would be like one hand clapping. As ever-changing and fluid sets of internal and external relationships, classes are never solid phalanxes, completely unified wholes or monolithic entities. Classes customarily consist of a variety of sub-classes or fractions, and consequently may unite or


fragment in a bewildering manner. Fractions of one class may attain a high degree of unity and solidarity, or they may split away and join with fractions of other classes to form a new class. Class conflict is the primary dynamic of history, according to Marx, but we should be careful not to interpret too narrowly his meaning on this score. Class conflict need not be overt, actual struggle and open strife. Conflict can take the form of tension and cleavage without open hostilities and the resort to violence. More importantly, intra-class conflict may be historically just as significant as inter-class conflict. Indeed, historically the two seem to be functionally related. Where there is a high degree of inter-class conflict, intra-class contention may be minimal. If a class is to survive in a condition of open war with other classes, intra-class harmony and unity are essential, and hence under such conditions, there seems to be a tendency to put internal differences and fractional disputes aside and to mobilize all elements for the confrontation with the class enemy. Nevertheless there are some cases, as in the English Civil War, where sections of the ruling class mobilize popular forces even against each other. Generally when interclass struggle is minimal, when hostilities cool and a lull in strife ensues, relationships of intra-class fractions may become more tense and contentious. Typical of this kind of development is the success of a ruling class in eliminating the immediate danger of its more formidable class foes, or rendering them docile.10 Paradoxically when this situation is preceded by the transformation of ruling class composition into a more homogenous whole of similar background and less diverse interests than before; when stakes of office and riches become very high, and circumstances are complicated by warfare with a foreign power, or survival of a ruling class relic from the past is endangered, the result may be internecine conflict of colossal proportions. In such a scene (typifying late Republican Rome) of increasing ruling class equality and homogeneity, it may fragment into struggling fractions and groups in a genuine Hobbesian war of all against all, drawing in other classes, often dividing, into the fray. Such crises within the ruling class may erupt into fullscale civil war which cannot be explained by inter-class conflict alone. Inter-class conflict, its condition at any given time, is as we have seen certainly a factor, but not the only one. By considering intra-class as well as inter-class conflict Marxism can


shed light on some of the great historical periods of civil turbulence and revolution: Athens in the last decade of the Peloponnesian War, the disintegration and fall of the Roman Republic, the English Revolution of 1640–60, and the French Revolution. Classes can exist in both the objective and subjective senses. Objectively classes were coeval with the origins of the first states and have continued to the present. Subjectively, class is a much rarer phenomenon. Members of a class may be unaware of their existence as a class, the rule rather than the exception throughout history. The subjective sense of class occurs when members achieve a high degree of consciousness of themselves as comprising a distinct class with interests and goals in direct opposition to those of other classes. Class in the objective sense is a useful heuristic category that reveals much about the nature of a social structure, especially casting light on the origins and development of class in the subjective sense at any given historical moment. On the question of the objective and subjective meanings of class, Marx differentiates ‘class in itself’, and ‘class for itself’, between class, less developed in terms of the consciousness of its members, and class with a high degree of consciousness of its interests and a willingness to assert them against the interests of other classes. Relations between appropriators and producers have constant effects on social processes even when the people involved do not think of themselves as classes, sometimes resulting in peasant revolts and similar outbreaks. Only in the second sense does class cease to be a latent aggregation of disparate individuals and, acting collectively, becomes an instrument for social change. Class characterized by class consciousness – class for itself – usually appears on the historical scene in times of acute stress, mounting exploitation and oppression, and relative deprivation. The close physical proximity and association of the members of a class, for example, in an urban environment; and the existence of various institutions like taverns, coffee houses, weekly markets, burial societies, clubs, workshops, trade unions, and parties which facilitate mutual education by offering opportunities for discussion and the exchange of ideas, are essential factors. Capitalism in particular, as it gradually transforms the labour process, for instance turning craftsmen into factory workers, produces a new sense of common class experience by socializing production. In this way class in the objective sense is transformed into


a fully actualized class – ‘class in itself and for itself’ – which makes itself and turns to the political arena for the realization of its interests and aims in opposition to other classes, and under certain conditions resorts to extra-legal means, violence and even revolution. Because of different histories, institutions, and cultures, classes and class systems will differ in different societies that have attained a similar level of economic development. Prior to the appearance of capitalism a given class system can be characterized by a complexity compounded by a plethora of status groups. As capitalism develops, Marx believes, class structure becomes simplified and is eventually polarized into two antagonistic classes: capitalists and workers. Marx may have exaggerated the role of inter-class struggle as the driving force of history and underestimated the part played by intraclass conflict. Nevertheless there can be no doubt about the significance of his theory of class in general. During the last three decades or so, however, the concept of class has fallen out of fashion among politicians, pundits, scholars, and even activists. Other ‘identities’ like race and gender and multiple identities have replaced class, which tends to be discounted, seldom adequately understood, and often confused with status. The emphasis has been on social harmony and cooperation with the conviction among neo-liberals in North America and Britain that advanced capitalism has created a classless society. Yet at the very time that capitalism has emerged triumphant on the world scene, and when privatization and the free market have become the watchwords of politicians of every variety, class politics seems to be returning. Governmental threats of lowering social costs and dismantling the welfare state, the mounting public concern over unemployment and growing impoverishment in leading industrial and third world countries, and the widening gap between rich and poor, and the numerous protests against globalization all appear to be pointing the way to a return of class politics and a definite revival of interest in the notion of class among writers and scholars. Class analysis remains a most valuable means of understanding many aspects of our current problems as well as a vital tool for historical studies.

7.4 Conception of the state A consideration of class and class conflict leads directly to a fourth fundamental principle of Marxism, the conception of the state. Marx


and Engels stipulated in the Communist Manifesto that ‘the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’, and more generally that ‘political power, properly so called is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another’. Although Marx never systematically developed these insights, his thoughts on the subject can be pieced together. Politics is class conflict, inter-class and intra-class struggle, with the ultimate goal of the capture of state power. Throughout history, the state is conceived by Marx to be the chief means by which the ruling class maintains itself and exercises its domination and exploitation of other classes in society. As the system of surplus appropriation (the mode of production) has changed in the past so has the nature of the ruling class and the class structure of a given society. Even more fundamentally, different modes of production mean different relations between the state and the dominant classes, for example where the state is itself an instrument of appropriation, as against capitalism where ‘economic’ and ‘political’ are formally separate. Marx underscores the coercive power of the state as the instrument of the ruling class or an alliance of classes. The stress is usually on the army, the police, and the courts as the prime means by which the ruling class defends and strengthens its domination and exploitation of the subjected classes. Another aspect of state control, however, is not neglected. The historical state does not rest solely on coercive force, for if the state is to survive, it must sheath the sword of power in the scabbard of authority. The state must attempt to give its conduct and policies an appearance of legitimacy in the view of the governed. An important element of acquiescence and consent as well as coercion is the foundation of the state. The state must engineer consent, render the subjected classes more pliable to its commands. It does so by ideology, in the past mainly by religion, by a code of practical morality, by a gentlemanly ethic, and a host of manipulative symbols, institutions, and devices: pageantry, ritual and ceremony, bread and circuses, contests and competition, the manufacture of external threats, and so forth. All are intended to win popular support and pacify the governed. Marx emphasizes the role of religion and morality for these ends. Marxists in the twentieth century, most notably Antonio Gramsci with his own well-known doctrine of hegemony, have developed this aspect of Marx’s thought by focusing on culture: manifold


cultural forms and institutions as the means of bolstering political domination by moulding the values and attitudes of the exploited classes. In addition to coercive power and ideological manipulation, Marx suggests other ways in which class domination and exploitation are maintained and advanced. Office holders and governmental functionaries are selected from individuals who share the beliefs and interests of the ruling class, if not themselves actually of the ruling class. Governmental policies are also designed to forward the interests of the ruling classes, for instance by strengthening those forms of surplus appropriation and the property relations on which they rest that are most advantageous to the established structure of economic and political power. If, however, the instrumental conception of the state is a central tenet of Marxism, it should not be thought of in a crude or simplistic fashion. Classes, as we have seen, much less ruling classes, are not unified, monolithic wholes, but fluid sets of social relationships, constantly fragmenting and coalescing. A ruling class resembles nothing so much as an alliance of various fractions, which at any given time constitutes a class because of a common interest opposed to the interests of other classes, but which may also have a number of diverse and conflicting interests. A state, moreover, may not simply be the tool of a single dominant class, but the instrument of several dominant classes that join forces out of convenience and expediency. These dominant classes may go their separate ways or eventually display consistent and lasting unity on major issues, which means in effect that they have fused into a single dominant class, although differing interests appear and bring the fusing elements into conflict. Instrumental though the state may be, it is not a puppet whose strings are regularly and in unison pulled by the members of the ruling class. For example, great landlords of ancient lineage must in some way cooperate with lesser landlords, with wealthy merchants and bankers, and newly rich industrialists. The state, in other words, must advance the interests of the ruling class as a whole, not only one fraction of it. To do otherwise would threaten the fragile harmony of the ruling class and perhaps end in the loss of power. The state (more accurately the government representing the state) must somehow resolve in its conduct and policies the differing and often conflicting interests of the fractions making up the ruling class or of the interests of an alliance of classes. Government must lead, guide,


and direct the various fractions and classes, a political task requiring skill, tact, flexibility, decisiveness, and compromise. To serve the ruling class or classes effectively, government must consider their long range interests, their survival and strength in the future as well as the present, not their divergent interests so much as what is common to those interests, the common interest of the fractions of the ruling class or an alliance of classes which is normally identified with the common interest of society as a whole. Essentially, the state (and its government) to be an effective instrument must maintain a degree of independence from the specific interests and pressures of ruling class fractions. The state is not completely independent in its instrumental endeavours, but in a degree independent. Recent Marxists in discussing the capitalist state have called this latitude of action and policy ‘relative autonomy’. Keeping in mind that state autonomy is structurally determined and historically variable (as noted at the beginning of this section), capitalist and other states must conserve and promote whenever possible the conditions for ruling class domination and exploitation, and these conditions are customarily equated with the common interest. From this standpoint government represents itself as arbiter of the common interest. Instead of the traditional legal and juridical conception of the state, Marxism postulates a fundamentally new multi-dimensional theory of the state fusing the political, economic, sociological, cultural, and historical into a single whole. A theory of the state embedded in the historically changing economic structure of society, when properly utilized, can be of considerable worth to historical studies and make a positive contribution to the assessment of past political ideas. Marxism is a promising approach to the analysis of those ideas by situating them in the relevant contexts of everyday life, by interrelating the intellectual and material realms, using each as a means of examining and illuminating the other. The basic principles of Marxism – the salience of the economic, the idea of history as dynamic process in which the form of surplus appropriation is crucial, the notion of class and class conflict, and the conception of the state – are welded together into a powerful tool for exploring and explaining much that has been neglected or unperceived in the examination of political theory.

8 Afterword: Toward the Future

As I confessed in the opening pages my approach may seem old-fashioned and unfashionable to many readers, especially because of my emphasis on the state, my particular brand of contextualizing political theory, and my stress on its utility. Whatever the merits or demerits of the approach, I shall conclude with some reflections on these three characteristics. In view of the momentous occurrences of the last few decades, my focus on the state in reference to the discussion of political theory may seem dated to many, not in keeping with the times. For we are constantly being told that the state today appears to be in a process of dissolution and fragmentation. One example often given is the disintegration of the nation-state into smaller nationalistic and ethnic entities in the former USSR, eastern Europe, the Balkans, Spain, Italy, Canada and Indonesia, a particularism and localism which is being used by politicians to their own advantage. The state everywhere, moreover, even when fragmentation poses no problem, seems to have fallen into the hands of politicians of mediocrity. They are in politics for short term interests and have lost all sense of direction, manipulating the electorate and the media for their own narrow aims and survival. The low esteem in which politicians are now held is partially the result of economic problems in the advanced industrial countries. Unemployment in Western Europe is still fairly high and growth rates could be higher. So-called ‘flexible employment’ – non-union part-time labour of both sexes with low wages and few if any social benefits – is on the upswing. Some politicians are even considering, along with ever greater reliance on privatization, the 155


partial dismantlement of the welfare state encouraged by citizens’ mounting antagonism to higher taxes. Debilitating impoverishment, in spite of economic growth, has spread. The gap between rich and poor is ever widening. Troubles in most advanced states are compounded by the rending of the social fabric by soaring crime, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency, and racial conflict. At the same time that the state seems to be weakening and fragmenting, however, there has been movement toward economic integration and larger quasi-political units. Examples of the first, prominent in today’s news are the American-Pacific Economic Community; and especially the Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Canada, and the North American Free Trade Agreement between them and Mexico. Both of the latter arrangements are the beginnings of economic integration and perhaps of eventual political assimilation, which, of course, means domination by the United States. As to the second, the forging of political bodies transcending the nation-state, the history of the United Nations immediately comes to mind, although its prestige has appreciably diminished in recent years. Of interest also is the European Union that promises a greater political whole with some of the attributes of sovereignty hitherto characterizing the nation-state. Even here, nevertheless, as economic circumstances deteriorate, a disillusion with this type of universalism seems to be growing, along with some calls for a return to the safe haven of the state. Further evidence is now being offered for the gradual dissolution of the state as a result of what is commonly called ‘globalization’, especially since the nineteenth-seventies. The significance of globalization is not only the internationalization of the economy but also the superimposition upon the traditional world system of a new order that apparently transcends and by-passes the normal social and political functions of the state. Globalization seems to be identical with increasing American economic domination of the world. Globalization, however, appears in fact not to have weakened the state. The very foundation of global capitalist expansionism is the vigorous state. Capitalism appears to need the state more than ever before, although this may mean that the state ‘voluntarily’ relinquishes certain of its powers, such as controls over capital. At any rate, active international corporations are solidly based in particular states (in respect to officials, directors, and shareholders),

Afterword: Toward the Future 157

in the capitalist political titans: America, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain, and Canada. Despite their increasing international projects, the gargantuan global corporations are firmly rooted in their home states, and look to them for encouragement, support, and protection, military and otherwise. Governments of the leading capitalist states in turn exert considerable regulation and direction over transnational corporations. The states themselves, the chief agents of domestic and international capitalism, must reconcile the competing interests and conflicts of their indigenous corporations, both at home and abroad, and secure them in their global ventures. Moreover, the economic physicians of international capitalism, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which in countries experiencing economic breakdown foster capitalism to the advantage of the great political powers, especially the United States, derive their enormous remedial funds from those powers themselves, which means, of course, their tax-payers. The decline and dissolution of the state, therefore, does not seem to be imminent. The specter that should haunt us, however, is the emergence of a single super-power like America, dominating the world culturally, economically, and politically. Culturally, the world appears to be undergoing a gradual process of Americanization. Rampant American consumerism in the midst of burgeoning poverty, inequality, disease, and inequity seems to have captivated the global population. Now that the United States’ chief rival, the Soviet Union, has been destroyed, as was Carthage in the second century BC, the new Rome centred in Washington, DC has fewer substantial constraints on its activities. The insatiable appetite for resources and commodities in the United States may one day destroy the planet. The capitalism now sweeping the world seems to be in the image of American capitalism with its soulless vision of Amertopia, ideology of the free market and ‘freedom of choice’, obliteration of the past, mindless consumerism, and displacement of critical thought by the slogans and sound bites of public relations and the media. If as John Locke said over four hundred years ago, ‘in the beginning all the World was America’, we may in the years to come be forced to conclude that in the end all the world will be America, a prospect too horrifying to contemplate.1 Whatever the future holds in store for us, whether the state as we know it will disappear, or a single colossus will dominate the earth,


political power will remain, if in different modes of organization. The same problems and questions so central to political theory will persist, old wine in new bottles. Whatever the nature of institutions and structures of power in the future, there will still be relationships entailed by domination and subordination, the problems of control and responsibility, of democracy, liberty, and equality. The new structures will pose, even more than before, the old fundamental question of their justice and the justice of their actions. Consequently our Western European experience with the state and with the reflections and commentary of the political theorists on that experience should perform yeoman service. A second old-fashioned trait of my approach is the insistence on situating past political ideas in their relevant historical contexts. This has been the burden of my argument throughout the book and I do not wish to be unduly repetitive here, only to call attention to the fact that ‘context’ may mean different things to different analysts. I have stressed the concrete context of social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements ‘out there’, not the many contexts of ideas, or constellations of ideas, or diverse modes of discourse through which the political ideas are articulated. It would be rash, indeed, to minimize the important role of the latter in shaping the ideas of political theorists. But my purpose has been to emphasize the former concrete context, together with the interaction between the material and ideational in a manner distinct from the old tradition of the history of ideas, or in the most current postmodern discourse theories. My stress on this specific form of contextualization is perhaps not as old-fashioned as it may seem, for less than four decades ago (if my memory serves me) George Lichtheim reviewed in the New Statesman C. B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), concluding that it was a ground-breaking venture because of its attempt to relate systematically the political ideas of the Levellers, Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke to the developing market society, in other words to the emergence of English capitalism. Possibly it is an old-fashioned mode of analysis, since intellectual styles today change so rapidly that one is often hard pressed to determine what is and is not fashionable. The latest vogue of the linguistic reductionism and idealism of the Cambridge School may, of course, be even more old-fashioned than my approach, mutton dressed up as lamb: a


continuation and refinement of the traditional history of ideas genre in sophisticated methodological guise. Its practitioners seem to go out of their way to avoid polluting the real world of ideas with the material world of every day life as experienced in the past by countless generations of ordinary people. This appears to be particularly true in respect to the avoidance of contaminating past political ideas with conceptions of production and distribution, and profit and loss, represented by the economic notions of a culture which in turn reflect the realities of economic power generating social process and development, and are of the very essence of politics in the past as in the present. This intellectual drift away from a concern with the material world perhaps accounts for the appearance of histories of medieval political thought that fail to draw some kind of connection between the political ideas of the epoch and the commercialization of society between 1000 and 1500 – markets, specialization, pattern of land holdings, serfdom, etc.; or a recent work on early modern political theory without mentioning developing capitalism or considering its influence on political ideas.2 In the new old-fashioned recourse to the history of ideas there seems almost a conspiracy to conceal the real world of hardship and poverty, coexisting with ease and wealth by a dazzling display of erudition about vocabularies, conceptual shifts, and traditions of discourse. A recent illustration of this attitude is that of one of the more moderate of the new old-fashioned critics – James Tully – toward the effort to relate Locke’s political ideas to the development of capitalism exemplified by Macpherson and later scholars.3 This endeavour is not so much a question of Locke’s ‘justification of capitalism’ – a red herring used by Tully that obscures the fundamental problem of how Locke’s ideas reflect, if at all, the beginnings of the basic structural change in English society eventually transforming the Western world. This seems to be an eminently sensible question of both historical and analytic relevance about the relationship of political ideas to economic interests, so crucial to politics and the existence of the state. Yet Tully (seemingly fixated by the ‘justification of capitalism’) refers to this general question as ‘a return to an older way of doing the history of political thought’.4 Instead, he maintains, we should free ourselves ‘from the tyranny of this question [justification of capitalism] in governing our investigations of seventeenth-century political thought, thus enabling us to ask new questions and perhaps


gain a more fine-grained understanding of the historically specific set of questions to which the Two Treatises is addressed’. Again he refers to understanding better ‘the local questions Locke was struggling with’, and that ‘in turning back the clock in this way [justification of capitalism] and imposing this old framework on the recent scholarship’ we prevent ‘the new ways of investigating and understanding the Treatises and 1680s it offers, including more pluralistic and less monolithic (either for or against capitalism) ways of thinking about our radical traditions …’.5 He then considers the efficacy of the very concept of the ‘“rise of capitalism” in the light of the new horizons opened up by recent scholarship’, and concludes by suggesting that those who introduce the notion of capitalism into the study of seventeenth-century English political thought are doing a serious disservice to scholarship by turning that century into a battle-ground over the relative merits of twentieth-century capitalism and socialism.6 The principal objection of Tully and like-minded critics of the ‘rise of capitalism’ as a social context affecting Locke’s political ideas and those of other theorists of the period simply cannot be explained by something (capitalism) that had not yet happened, that is had not reached a state of completion. They could not be expected to foresee the fruition of capitalism in Britain two centuries later, nor could they have had any conception of capitalism. But the critics seem to have missed the point. Capitalism (no more than any other major social phenomenon) just did not spring up out of nowhere. It had important roots in the ever-changing social and economic practices and values of the English people long before the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. Capitalism developed over the course of many years, at least from the late fifteenth century, first slowly in agriculture, then in industry and commerce. The lengthy process was one of gradual emergence and transformation. Students of political theory should be looking for signs in seventeenth-century thinkers of any reflection of the changing practices and values. In the case of Locke, for instance, are there any differences between his perception of English society and that of shrewd observers before him like Fortescue and Thomas Smith, or thinkers after him such as Hume, Adam Smith, and Burke, and if so how were his own political ideas affected? The ‘context of capitalism’ in these terms cannot be summarily dismissed or ignored. The problem must be directly confronted in


relation to other ‘more fine-grained’ approaches, to the ‘local questions’, that concerned Locke and others. Nothing better illustrates the significance of a ‘local question’ for political ideas than that of emerging agrarian capitalism for Locke’s ‘Of Property’, chapter Five of the Second Treatise. The chapter is devoted to landed property and imprinted with the language of the agrarian improvers of the time, whose works were well represented in the author’s library.7 After all, it should be remembered that Locke was originally a countryman and landholder, who lived in part from landed rents and who was the friend and associate of prosperous landed proprietors, including his wealthy patron, Lord Shaftesbury, himself an improver with many acres in the heartland of embryonic agrarian capitalism. In other words, Locke had a finger on the pulse of changing rural England. What must be established is how, from this vantage point, he viewed the actual process of agrarian capitalist development, even though he did not name it ‘process’ or ‘capitalist’. How did his perception shape his political ideas? This is a central problem, whose solution should not be impeded by any preconceived notion that these factors establish nothing. More generally, Tully’s objections (apparently shared by others of the Cambridge School) to the ‘rise of capitalism’ in even partial explanation of Locke’s outlook seem inexplicable. Instead of ‘capitalism’, Tully is willing to use the dubious omnibus ‘mercantilism,’ a potpourri of ideas, policies, and practices many economic historians find of little analytic value.8 If his substitution arises from the fact that ‘mercantilism’ is less anachronistic than capitalism, then he seems misinformed.9 In any case, his concept of capitalism as something that emerged much later, apparently born full-grown in its industrial form, conceptualizes away a long historical process of social and economic change.10 If capitalism, however, is perceived as a genuinely qualitative economic transformation emerging first in late fifteenth-century English agriculture out of a unique concatenation of social circumstances and slowly developing and energizing subsequent mercantile and industrial capitalism, reaching fruition in the nineteenth century, his objection is open to serious question. It is as if economic activity (and thought) were totally insulated from the world of political ideas. Tully’s resistance to the ‘rise of capitalism’ is perhaps not only due to his misunderstanding of the origin and nature of capitalism, but also to his notion of the history of


political ideas as a series of fragments (except as they relate to the overarching ideational paradigms) detached from the ever changing historical process of the material context, a context which after all is the chief referent of the ideas in the first place. He seems to share in the idealist assumptions and postmodern tendencies of the Cambridge School (see Chapter 5). It is, therefore, of little scholarly benefit to talk of the ‘tyranny’ of the question of the ‘rise of capitalism’, of an outmoded way of analysis, by implication the coarse grained as against the ‘fine-grained’ assessment of ‘more pluralistic and less monolithic ways of thinking’, or to contend that we are fighting out the ideological struggles of our age on the intellectual terrain of the past. Let us by all means explore the ideas of the political theorists in numerous contexts, showing the interrelationships between them, but we should never forget that politics and political theory have to do with the real world, a world that has relentlessly burdened and savaged most of its inhabitants. In our contextual analyses, moreover, we should always appreciate that words are signs and that the vocabularies of political theorists have referents in the things and activities of human beings in the empirical world. The reduction of politics to language, the talk of language games, the interpretation of past political theory as simply discourse, all represent a coarse grained and disturbing tendency in these times when an insidious intellectual nihilism threatens the realms of intellect and popular culture. In doing so we are demeaning the millions who have been broken on the wheel of history. Nor should we ignore that today’s fashions are often tomorrow’s relics. Finally, I may be charged with an old-fashioned way of viewing political theory because of my stress on its utility in attempting to resolve our own pressing social and political problems. We are often told that the usefulness of the subject is not a legitimate goal. The study of political theory is an intellectual end in itself. Or the greats of the past should be read because of their conceptual skill and literary artistry. Or they should be read out of a desire to preserve our cultural heritage and enrich our understanding of the past, to appreciate why we are as we are and our society is as it is; or to help in defining ourselves, in fulfilling ourselves by identifying and delineating more clearly our own beliefs and attitudes. All or any combination of some of these aims are quite rightly used to justify the study of political theory for academic and wider audiences. The utility of political


theory, nevertheless, its usefulness for orientation and practical guidance through our own turbulent sea of troubles is seldom dwelt upon today, although in the past it was often so conceived. And this is precisely how I have argued directly or indirectly throughout this volume. Let me clarify my position. I am not maintaining that any classic work of past political theory should serve as a detailed handbook for the guidance of contemporary social and political action. Far from it! My argument is basically the following. By steeping ourselves in the speculations of political theorists on the nature of state, politics, and society in their times, we may eventually begin to assess critically our own political activities, institutions, and arrangements. Instead of doing political theory as they did, faithfully following their prescriptions and duplicating their justificatory arguments, we should adapt their style of thinking about the state and politics, and strike out on our own. We should do so with detachment and commitment, passionately and dispassionately, seeing where our fundamental beliefs take us, and perhaps changing those beliefs in the process, marshalling the evidence, developing intellectually convincing arguments, and making persuasive points in the dialogue with ourselves, friends, and fellow-citizens. In the enterprise we should reason about political matters, constantly asking ourselves whether our way of proceeding is a reasonable one, and what the reasonable alternatives might be. What of the substance of our thinking about state and politics? In familiarizing ourselves with the range of problems and questions asked by the great theorists, and with their answers, prescriptions, and arguments, we will recognize that many of the questions raised are still worth asking and discussing. Even some of the prescriptions, if no longer acceptable, still merit careful consideration. In addition, more than a few of the problems, if not the answers, seem to be of direct relevance to our own experience and times, for example: constitutionalism and the limiting of government, governmental responsibility, the scope of governmental activity, the relationship between economics and politics, the role of knowledge in government and politics, the community and the individual private interest and the common interest, democracy, equality, liberty, rights, toleration, and so on. Always displaying an acute sensitivity to the problem of the justice of the state and its actions, the political theorist, today as in the past, must be ‘a Reformer of Politicks’. The justificatory arguments and


prescriptions of the past masters may be exceedingly useful in setting our own sights, even when we decide to discard them and steer our own course. Even when much of what they say is neither congenial nor convincing, their study can save a great deal of trouble and enable us to avoid many errors and pitfalls in our own political reflections. None of this is intended to suggest that all of us should become political theorists, although every person his or her own political theorist – each person a Socratic gadfly – is not such a bad recommendation for assuring the existence of a critical, informed, and watchful citizenry and an enlightened and responsible political leadership. Beyond this, however, careful study of the masters of political theory has another utility: that of inspiration and guidance in constructing political theories appropriate for the twenty-first century. This kind of mental creativity is desperately required in these perilous, disturbing, and disillusioning times. Only by seriously learning from a venerable tradition of thinking about politics will it be possible to construct comparable intellectual artifacts for the future. By doing so we revive, strengthen, and continue a powerful voice of reason in our political life. Instead of the outright dismissal of historical political theory, the critical use of the ‘canon’ may prove to be liberating, challenging, and rewarding.

Notes 1 Questions and problems 1. For a cogent defence of empiricism in the social sciences: Lynn McDonald, The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueens’ University Press, 1993). 2. Quoted by John Naughton, The Observer (The Observer Review) 23 June 1996, p. 11. 3. It is extremely difficult to select from the following or a comparable list, the names of six or seven persons who will be cherished in 2100 as the classic social and political thinkers of the twentieth century and whose works will still be widely read and carefully studied: Adorno, Althusser, Arendt, Berlin, Camus, Castell, Collingwood, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Dewey, Fanon, Foucault, Freud, Fromm, Gellner, Gentile, Gorz, Gramsci, Habermas, Hayek, Heidegger, Hobhouse, Horkheimer, Jouvenel, Jung, Kennan, Lacan, Laing, Laski, Lenin, Lippman, Lukacs, Macpherson, Mannheim, Marcuse, MerleauPonty, Michels, Neibuhr, Nozick, Nussbaum, Oakeshott, Ortega y Gasset, Orwell, Pareto, Poulantzas, Rawls, Rorty, Russell, Santayana, Sartre, Schmidt, Schumpeter, Simmel, Strauss, Tawney, Taylor, Voegelin, Wallas, Weber, Weil, Williams, Wittgenstein. 4. An exploration of the origins of the conception of ‘free market’, together with a telling critique is: David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (London: Verso, 1993). 5. Cicero, Orator, 120. Loeb Library tr.

2 State and politics 1. For the origins of the state and the nature of pre-state social life see in particular: Georges Balandier, Political Anthropology, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1970); Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service, eds, Origins of the State: the Anthropology of Political Evolution (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978); Morton H. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: an Essay in Political Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1967); Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: the Origins of Cultures (New York: Random House, 1977); Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962); J. V. S. Megaw, ed., Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe: an Archaeological Survey (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977); Marshall Sahlins Stone Age Economics (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974); Elman R. Service, Origins of the State and Civilization: the Process of Cultural Evolution (New York: Norton, 1975).

165

166 Notes

2. On the emergence of the conception of the state in early modern Europe: Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 349–58; and ‘The State’, in T. Ball, J. Farr, and R. L. Hansen, eds, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 90–131; Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 123–5; and Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ch. 3. Also of importance is Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: a Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991), chs. 2–3. 3. Fried, Evolution of Political Society, pp. 229–30. 4. See my article: ‘Sallust’s Theorem: a Comment on “Fear” in Western Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, XVI (1995), pp. 174–89. 5. Plutarch, ‘Cato Major,’, 27, The Parallel Lives. 6. ‘Political Education’, in Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 112. The lecture was given at the London School of Economics, 6 March 1951. 7. David Easton, The Political System: an Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 128. Easton later contends, pp. 135–46, that politics has to do with the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ in society. 8. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, tr. Thomas Nugent, Introduction by Franz Neumann (New York: Hafner, 1949), XIV, 13, p. 232. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tr. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 128. 9. For a recent essay dealing with some of the points raised in this paragraph: Isaiah Berlin, ‘On Political Judgement’, New York Review of Books, 3 October 1996, pp. 26–30. 10. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, From Max Weber, p. 78. 11. Hobbes, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies, Introduction by M. M. Goldsmith (2nd edn.; London: Cass, 1969), p. 59. 12. Bikhu Parekh, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Marx’, in Hannah Arendt: the Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 76. 13. For example: Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1964), pp. 18–21; David Miller, ‘Politics’, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. David Miller (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1987), pp. 390–1. 14. M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 51–4. 15. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, From Max Weber, p. 95. 16. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, in Walter Bagehot: a Study of His Life and Thought Together with a Selection from His Political Writings, ed. Norman St John-Stevas (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959), p. 386. 17. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, IV, i, 3, in The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1845), vol. 1, pp. 349–50.

Notes 167

18. Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), I, 3, pp. 8–13; II, 16, p. 477. For Montaigne on the importance of symbolism and ritual in politics: Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 111. 19. Pascal, Adversaria, 202, in Pascal’s Pensées, tr. H. F. Stewart (New York: Pantheon, 1950), p. 483. 20. Ibid., 204, p. 485. 21. Ibid., 205, p. 485. 22. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). For what follows, esp. pp. 64–67, 78–86. Also see my article: ‘The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke’s Political Thought’, Journal of British Studies, 4 (Nov. 1964), pp. 41–64.

3 Character of political theory 1. Eric A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 2. Plato, Theaetetus, 173c–175c. F. M. Cornford tr. 3. Locke, First Treatise, par. 106. 4. Cicero, Letters to His Friends, II, xv, 3, Shackleton Bailey tr.; also VII, xxviii, 3. Machiavelli, Letter No. 225, 16 April 1527, Forli, to Francesco Vettori in Florence, in The Letters of Machiavelli: a Selection of His Letters, tr. and ed. Allan Gilbert (New York: Capricorn, 1961), p. 249. 5. Machiavelli, Letter No. 120, 9 April 1513, Florence, to Francesco Vettori in Rome, in The Letters, p. 104. 6. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, tr. Thomas Hobbes, ‘To the Readers’. 7. On peasants, in addition to the works cited in n. 1, ch. 2,: Frederick C. Gamst, Peasants in Complex Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974); Jack M. Potter, May M. Diaz, and George M. Foster, eds, Peasant Society: A Reader (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasant and Peasant Societies: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971); Eric Wolf, Peasants (Eaglewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London: Verso, 1988). 8. On this latter point, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: a Genealogy of Rousseau’s “General Will”’, History of Political Thought, IV (1983), pp. 298–300.

4 Conditions favouring political theory 1. Throughout my generalizations about the Roman Empire rely primarily on the following: Géza Alföldy, The Social History of Rome, tr. David Braund and Frank Pollock (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985); Peter Garnsey and

168 Notes

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (London: Duckworth, 1987); Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); MacMullen, Roman Government’s Response to Crisis A.D. 235–337 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1976); MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1988); Ronald Mellor, Tacitus (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Chester G. Starr, The Roman Empire 27 B.C.–A.D. 476: A Study of Survival (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Starr, Roman Empire, p. 135. MacMullen, Roman Government’s Response, pp. 50–60. Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, 1–5. Loeb Library tr. Tacitus, A Dialogue on Oratory, 1. Loeb Library tr. Ibid., 28. Loeb Library tr. Mellor, Tacitus, p. 65. MacMullen, Enemies, p. 33. Mellor, Tacitus, pp. 3–4, 64–5, 111. On Catullus see R. M. Ogilvie, Roman Literature and Society (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1980) (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1980), pp. 71–76. Ogilvie quotes liberally from Catullus’ poems. Also see the perceptive comments in James E. G. Zetzel, ‘Looking Backward: Past and Present in the Late Roman Republic’, Pegasus, 37 (1994), esp. pp. 21–22. Lucretius, On Nature, tr. Russell M. Geer (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, 1965), p. 203. Cicero, Paradoxes of the Stoics, 27. Loeb Library tr. Cicero, Pro Sestio, 40.86. Loeb Library tr. Cicero, In Catilinam, 1.3, Loeb Library tr. Letters to Atticus, 4.19.1. Shackleton Bailey tr. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 2.1.8. Shackleton Bailey tr. Cicero, De re publica, 5.1.2. Loeb Library tr. Sallust, The War with Catiline, 5.9. Loeb Library tr.

5 Philosophical mode of analysis 1. Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, I, 12. Loeb Library tr. 2. Aristotle, Fragment from Protrepticus (Barnes and Lawrence tr.) in The Complete Works of Aristotle: the Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXX1.2, 1984), vol. 2, p. 2410. 3. Ludwig Edelstein, The Meaning of Stoicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Martin Classical Lectures, 21, 1966), pp. 75–80; Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: I. Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1985), p. 41. These are the only works of which I am aware that discuss the subject.

Notes 169

4. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VII, 168, 170, 171. Loeb Library tr. 5. Plato, Theaetetus, 173d–e. Cornford tr. 6. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, V, 8–9. Loeb Library tr. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VIII, 8. 7. Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), I, 26, p. 117. 8. Ernest Gellner, Words and Things: a Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study of Ideology, Introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Gollancz, 1959), p. 229. 9. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, V, 5. Loeb Library tr. 10. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, xvi, 3. 11. D. W. Hamlyn, Being a Philosopher: the History of a Practice (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 167–8. 12. Terry Eagleton, as reported in The Observer, 21 March 1993, p. 24. Or, ‘philosophy is a sickness of mind’, as reported in The Globe and Mail, 23 October 1993, p. C4. Also see Bernard Williams, ‘On Hating and Despising Philosophy’, London Review of Books, 18 April 1996, pp. 17–18. He writes (p. 17) that ‘it would be a bad friend of philosophy who did not admit that there is quite a lot of philosophical work that is unrewarding by any standard: unhelpful, boring, sterile. The awful fact is that some of it hardly tries to be anything else’. 13. For Pocock, see esp. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); and Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For Skinner, esp.: ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3–53; ‘Social Meaning and the Explanation of Social Action’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society, 4th ser., eds Peter Laslett, W. G. Runciman, and Quentin Skinner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), pp. 136–57; ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, Political Theory, 2 (August 1974), pp. 277–303; The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2 vols.; Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). This listing represents only a very small selection of the many writings of the two scholars. Their numerous essays on past political thinkers, when freed from the methodological baggage described below, are highly original interpretations, rich and perceptive contributions to the history of ideas. 14. For the phrase, ‘episodic history’, I am indebted to Cary J. Nederman ‘Quentin Skinner’s State: Historical Method and Traditions of Discourse’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 18 (June 1985), pp. 339–52. For a penetrating analysis of the Cambridge School’s treatment of history and historical context, Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Locke Against Democracy: Consent, Representation and Suffrage in the Two Treatises’, History of Political Thought, XIII (1992), pp. 657–89; and especially her ‘Radicalism, Capitalism and Historical Contexts: Not only a Reply to Richard Ashcraft on John Locke’, History of Political Thought, XV (1994), pp. 323–72.

170 Notes

15. It is interesting to speculate about a view of history roughly parallel with that of the Cambridge School, both reflecting postmodern tendencies, that of revisionist historians of seventeenth-century England like Conrad Russell. The historian, according to the revisionists, should minutely criticize a past event or medley of events, more or less isolated from the historical process, and without attempting to relate the events to past or future developments. Still one of the most perceptive and incisive criticisms of the revisionists is in T. K. Rabb, ‘The Role of the Commons’, Past and Present, 92 (August 1981), esp. pp. 75–76. Also see E. M. Wood, ‘Radicalism, Capitalism and Historical Contexts’. 16. In view of these remarks, historians of political theory (including the Cambridge School) should ponder E. P. Thompson’s complaint against Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff over their specific criticism of his treatment of Adam Smith and the traditionalists on the market: Hont and Ignatieff prefer to operate in a detached discipline of political ideas and rhetoric. They do not wish to know how ideas presented themselves as actors in the market-place, between producers, middlemen and consumers, and they imply that this is an improper light in which to view them. It may be ‘the crucial point’ for Hont and Ignatieff that debate over market strategies divided philosophers among themselves no less deeply than it divided the crowd from Smith, but my essay is about the crowd and not about philosophers. Hont and Ignatiev are rebuking me for writing an essay in social history and in popular culture instead of in approved Cambridge themes. I ought to have grabbed a bell-rope and pealed out Quesnay along with Pufendorf, Pocock, Grotius, Hume and the rest. See E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), p. 275; Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in The Wealth of Nations’, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds, Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 43.

6 Historical mode of analysis 1. Stephen Werner, Blueprint: a Study of Diderot and the ‘Encyclopédie’ Plates (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, 1993). 2. See n. 14, Chapter 5, for citations to C. J. Nederman and E. M. Wood. 3. Beard concludes the ‘Introduction to the 1935 Edition’ with the words: ‘Nevertheless, whoever leaves economic pressures out of history or out of the discussion of public questions is in mortal peril of substituting mythology for reality and confusing issues instead of clarifying them. … It is for us … to inquire constantly and persistently, when theories of national power or states’ rights are propounded: “What interests are behind them and to whose advantage will changes or the maintenance of old forms accrue?” By refusing to do this we become victims of history – clay in the hands of its makers.’

Notes 171

7 Marxism and the Historical Mode of Analysis 1. The New Yorker, 20 and 27 October 1997, pp. 248–59. 2. An invaluable introduction to Marx’s political ideas is Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Also see Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1968). Many of the points which I touch upon are dealt with far more extensively in Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), a work to which I am deeply indebted. 3. Of direct relevance is Robert Brenner’s monumental study: Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. ‘Postscript’. 4. See the insightful treatment by George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, Foreword by George Rudé (London: Verso, 1987). 5. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: the Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London: Verso, 1988). 6. Ibid., ch. 5, on this question. 7. Marx, Capital, III, chap. 47. 8. On the peasant-citizen and Athenian democracy: E. M. Wood, PeasantCitizen and Slave. 9. My position on class has been greatly influenced by E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), esp. pp. 9–12. Also see the rich interpretation of Thompson on class in E. M. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism. 10. For this and the following see my brief assessment of late Roman republican class structure: Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 2.

8 Afterword: toward the future 1. John Locke, Second Treatise, par. 49. Locke was referring to the pristine, pre-colonial character of the American wilderness. 2. For example: J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought: c. 350–c.1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and J. H. Burns, ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought: 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3. James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 125–36. ‘Justification of Capitalism’, in what follows is Tully’s expression. 4. Ibid., p. 126. 5. Ibid., p. 127. 6. Ibid., pp. 134–6.

172 Notes

7. See my John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). In writing it I was influenced by the works of Eric Kerridge, Ann Kussmaul, Lawrence Stone, Joan Thirsk, Charles Webster, and especially by the perceptive essays of Robert Brenner now collected in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, eds T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On Locke and agrarian capitalism and improvement, also see Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Radicalism, Capitalism and Historical Context: Not only a Reply to Richard Ashcraft on John Locke’, XV (1994), History of Political Thought, pp. 323–72, for the relation of agrarian capitalism to subsequent English social and political thinkers, particularly Adam Smith: David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: a Reinterpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). On the importance of agrarian capitalism: Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991), ch. 6; and Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On English agrarian capitalism in contrast to what occurred elsewhere: George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, Foreword by George Rudé (London: Verso, 1987), chs. 2, 4 and ‘Conclusion’; Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany (London: Verso, 1991). 8. On ‘mercantilism’ and ‘capitalism’, E. M. Wood, ‘Radicalism, Capitalism and Historical Contexts’. 9. According to the O.E.D. ‘capitalism’ was first used in 1854, and ‘mercantilism’ not until 1873. ‘Mercantilist’ dates from 1854 and ‘mercantile system’ from Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Burke in 1790 in Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), p. 184, seems to have been among the first to employ ‘capitalist’ (‘landed capitalist’), followed by Arthur Young in 1792. Both ‘capital’ and ‘mercantile’ were common in the seventeenth century, preceded by ‘commerce’ from the late sixteenth century. 10. It is no more questionable to refer to the ‘rise of capitalism’ than to the developing practices and ideas embraced by the expression, the ‘rise of Christianity’. See W.H.C. Frend’s brilliant work, The Rise of Christianity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984).

Index Aegidius Romanus, 74 aesthetics, 36 American-Pacific Economic Community, 156 Annals, 77 Aquinas, Thomas, De Regno, 62 Arendt, H., The Human Condition, 31 aristocracy, 53, 54 Aristotle, 40, 44, 52, 65, 78–9, 93, 125–6 Nicomachean Ethics, 53 Politics, 59 Augustine, Saint, 57, 65, 72, 85 Augustus, Caesar, 75, 77 authoritarianism, 10 authority, and power, 29–30 Bagehot, W., 34 Beard, C.A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 130 Being a Philosopher: the History of a Practice, 99–100 Bodin, J., Heptaplomeres, 76 bourgeois revolution, 142–3 Breuner, Robert, 171n7 Britain, 160 Burke, E., 9, 36, 59, 62, 65 Caesar, Julius, 75, 85 Caligula, 77 Cambridge School, 92, 101–9, 120, 134, 158, 162 canonical texts, 3–4 Capital, 145 capitalism, 5–6, 128, 134, 138, 141, 144, 151, 156–7 in England, 158 and Locke, 159–61 rise of, 161–2

Carthage, 22 Cassidy, J., 133 Catullus, 85 Cato Major, 22 Cato Minor, 81 ceremony, 35–6 change, 10–11 Cicero, 9, 39, 44, 48, 52, 59, 72, 93–4, 98–9 De legibus, 86 De officiis, 62 De re publica, 86 Tusculan Disputations, 95–6 class, 146–51, 152 meanings of, 150 class conflict, 149 Cleanthes, 94 coercion, 31, 61, 152 Colish, M.L., 95 Collingwood, R.G., 102 common experience, 123–4 Communist Manifesto, 6, 134, 152 Comninel, George, 171n4, 172n7 compliance, 30 conceptual models, 111–12 conflict, 45, 73–6 and politics, 26 conformism, 88 contextualization, 158 ‘creative destruction’, 5 crimes of governments, 21–2 Dante Alighieri, 74 De legibus, 86 De officiis, 62 De re publica, 86 De Regno, 62 De rerum natura, 85–6 Defensor Pacis, 62 democracy, 74

173

174 Index

Democritus, 40 A Dialogue on Oratory, 81 Diderot, D., Encyclopédie, 120–1 Diogenes Laertius, 93, 94 Discourses, 59, 76 domination, 19–20 Domitian, 77 Eagleton, T., 100 Easton, D., 25 economic integration, 156 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 130 economics, 116, 135–8 education, 78–84, 88 and political theorists, 62, 63 and the Roman Empire, 80, 86 empiricism, 2 Encyclopédie, 120–1 Engels, F., 63, 152 England capitalism, 158 fifteenth-century agriculture, 161 in the seventeenth century, 105–6 in the sixteenth century, 119 Enlightenment, 66, 68 Epictetus, 95 Epicurus, 85 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 40, 62, 67–8 European Union, 156 exploitation, 146, 153 fear of rulers, 22–3 and state, 22–3, 36 feminism, 6 feudalism, 142 Finley, M.I., 32 First Treatise of Government, 42 Fortescue, Sir John, 74 The Governance of England, 47 freedom, 82 freedom of expression, 76–8 in the Roman Empire, 77–8

French Utopians, 57 Fried, M., 18 Gellner, E., 97 generative dimension, 46, 47–56 gentleman, concept of, 50–1, 96 Gerson, Jean, 74 globalization, 6, 156 Good and Bad Government, 34 The Governance of England, 47 governments, crimes of, 21–2 Gramsci, A., 152 Greece, 40–1 Greece and Rome, peasants in, 147–8 Hamlyn, D.W., Being a Philosopher: the History of a Practice, 99–100 Harrington, J., 57 Hegel, G.W.F., 59, 63 Helvétius, 68 Heptaplomeres, 76 ‘hero’ and ‘anti-hero’, 52–6, 111 historical amnesia, 5–6 historical analysis, 112–13 historical approach, 91, 115–32 and ideology, 126–31 and Marxism, 133–54 historical change, 10–11 historical comparison, 10 historical context, 124–5, 158 historical materialists, 7 historical practice, 118 historicism, and relativism, 122–6 Histories, 77, 86–7 history, 8–10, 92 antipathy to, 5–6 as a dynamic process, 138–46 and philosophy, 109–13 and postmodernism, 7 of the state, 60 and theory, 12 History, Thucydides, 49 history of ideas, 103 History of Richard III, 49

Index 175

Hobbes, Thomas, 24, 45, 49, 54, 65, 66, 67, 79 influences on, 117 Leviathan, 58, 59, 62 Holland, 76 homo faber, 54 Hooker, R., 9, 34–5, 67 The Human Condition, 31 human ideal, 52–3, 54–5, 63 human malleability, 67 human nature, conception of, 66–8, 69 Hume, David, 59 idealism, 104, 105, 107–8 ideas and material conditions, 117–21 social context, 11–12 social history of, 115–16, 120–1 ideology, 37, 47 definition, 127–8 and the historic approach, 126–31 and state, 23–4 imperialism, 83 inequality, and state, 20–21 institutional forms of state, 18 intellectual justification, 63–5 intellectual quality, 78–84 interest, 131 definition, 130 and politics, 128 International Monetary Fund, 157 ivory tower syndrome, 92–101 John of Salisbury, 60, 74 Policraticus, 62 justice, 24–5, 43, 56 Kallipolis, Plato, 21 Keynes, J.M., 4 Kuhn, Thomas, S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 102 labour, 94–5, 136–7 social division of, 123 labouring classes, 53

language, 110, 123, 162 and politics, 32–4 Laws, Plato, 48, 57–8, 67 Levellers, 61 Leviathan, 62, 63 Lichtheim, G., 158 life-experience of political theorists, 118–19 literature on political theory, 2–4, 39–40 Locke, John, 39, 45, 52, 54–5, 59, 79 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 40, 62, 67–8, 99 and capitalism, 159–61 First Treatise of Government, 42 Letter on Toleration, 76 ‘Of Property’, 161 Second Treatise, 61 Two Treatises, 40, 62, 65, 76, 110, 159–60 Lorenzetti, A., Good and Bad Governance, 34 Lucretius, 85 De rerum natura, 85–6 Machiavelli, N., 54, 60, 66, 67 Discourses, 59, 76 The Prince, 48, 59, 61, 62, 76 MacMullen, R., 80, 84 Macpherson, C.B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 158 Marsiglio of Padua, 60, 74 Defensor Pacis, 62 Marx, Karl, 55, 57, 63, 66, 68, 100, 126 Capital, 76–7, 145 Communist Manifesto, 6, 134, 152 conception of state, 151–4 influences on, 117 notion of classical antiquity, 143 stage conception of history, 138–46

176 Index

Marxism, 91 and the historical approach, 133–54 material factors, 136 mass media, 6, 7 McDonald, Lynn, 165n1 McNally, David, 165n4, 172n7 Mein Kampf, 63 Mellor, R., 83 mercantilism, 161 Miliband, Ralph, 171n2 Mill, J.S., 46, 55, 59 The Subjection of Women, 51 mode of production, 144–5 monarchs, 30 Montaigne, M.E. de, 35, 96 Montesquieu, C., 26 Persian Letters, 76 Mooers, Colin, 172n7 More, Thomas, 48–9, 58, 59, 67, 119 History of Richard III, 49 Utopia, 21, 49, 54, 60, 110 Musonius Rufus, 95 mystification of philosophy, 93 Nederman, Cary J., 169n14, 170n2 Nero, 77, 82 New Statesman, 158 The New Yorker, 133 Nicimachean Ethics, 53 Nicolas of Cusa, 47, 74 non-linguistic symbols, 107 non-philosophic theorizing, 65 non-verbal symbols, and politics, 34–6 North American Free Trade Agreement, 156 Oakeshott, M., 25 oratory, 81 origins of political theory, 40–1 Paine, Thomas, 63 Parekh, B., 31 Paris commune, 57

Pascal, Blaise, 35–6 peasants, 60 in Greece and Rome, 147–8 persecution of writers, 76–7 persuasive dimension, 46, 61–9 justificatory element, 68–9 pessimism, 83–8 Petronius, Satyricon, 80 Philo Judaeus, 72 philosophic theorizing, 65 philosophical approach, 91–101 philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome, 94–6 as a guide to life, 98–9 and history, 109–13 mystification of, 93 physical coercion, 31 Pindar, 41 Plato, 40–1, 44, 52, 53, 59, 78–9, 93, 94, 126 historical context, 124–5 idealism, 103–5 influences on, 117 Kallipolis, 21, 59 Laws, 48, 57–8, 67 The Republic, 48, 53, 57–8, 59, 62, 65, 110 The Statesman, 48 Theatetus, 41–2, 95 Pliny the Younger, 77 Pocock, J.G.A., 101 Policraticus, 62 polis, 18, 25, 59, 110 development, 41 political commitment, 47 political conflict, 73–6 political theorists, 44–6 and education, 62, 63 life-experience of, 118–19 political activity of, 44–5 political theory origins of, 40–1 and reform, 43–4 study of, 13 utility of, 162–3 works on, 2–4, 39–40

Index 177

The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 158 political thought, 73 politicians, skills of, 27 politics, 21 and appearance, 26 and conflict, 26 definitions, 25 and interest, 128 and language, 32–4, 102, 103, 105–6, 107 meaning of, 25–32 and non-verbal symbols, 34–6 and power, 27–9 and symbolic forms, 32–7 Politics, Aristotle, 59 Polybius, 44, 72 postmodernism, 7, 122 power, 36, 42 and authority, 29–30 and opinion, 29 and politics, 27–9 prescription for state, 61 prescriptive dimension, 46, 56–61 The Prince, 48, 59, 61, 76 Protagoras, 40–1, 94 public buildings, 34 Publins Nascia, 22 Pythagoras, 95 racial minorities, 6 reality, 106 reform, 43–4 relativism, and historicism, 122–6 relevance, 8 religion, 34 The Republic, Plato, 48, 53, 57–8, 59, 62, 65, 110 ritual, 35–6 Roman Empire, 71–3, 75–6, 79–84 and education, 80–1, 86 freedom of expression in, 77–8 and pessimism, 83–7 Rousseau, J.J., 55, 62, 66, 68 Second Discourse, 65 The Social Contract, 57 ruling classes, 61

Sallust, 83, 85 Histories, 86–7 Satyricon, 80 Schumpeter, J., 5 Second Discourse, 65 Second Treatise, 61 Seneca, 73 Skinner, Quentin, 101 slavery, 52, 143–4 Smith, Adam, 59, 137, 138 stage conception of history, 138–9 Wealth of Nations, 137, 138 Smith, Sir Thomas, 119 social conservatism, 9 The Social Contract, 57 social criticism, 68 social environmentalism, 67–8 social history, of ideas, 115–16, 120–1 social inequality, 20–1 social life, 85–6 social relationships, 137, 138 social turmoil, 73–6 socialism, 141 Socrates, 40 Sophism, 93 Starr, C., 80, 83 state, 13, 49–50, 155–6 benefits of, 19, 24 coercive power, 152 definitions, 17–19 dissolution, 156 early modern conception, 18–19 and fear, 22–3, 36 history of, 60 and ideology, 23–4 and inequality, 20–1 institutional forms, 18 interests, 20 Marxist conception, 151–4 nature of, 17–25 negative aspects, 19–20 prescription for, 61 reform, 56–9 and violence, 21–2 states, first appearance, 17

178 Index

The Statesman, 48 status, 148 Stoicism, 81–3, 94–5 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 102 study of political theory, 13 The Subjection of Women, 51 surplus appropriation, 145–7 Tacitus, 83–5 A Dialogue on Oratory, 81 Annals, 77 Histories, 77 technological innovation, 137–8 Theatetus, 41–2, 95 theory, and history, 12 Thomas, Saint, 65, 74 Thompson, E.P., 170n16, 171n9 Thucydides, History, 49 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 63 Trajan, 83 truth, 64 Tully, J., 159–61 Tusculan Disputations, 95–6 Two Treatises, 40, 62, 65, 76, 110, 159–60 unemployment, 155

United Nations, 156 United States, 157 utility of political theory, 162–3 Utopia, 21, 49, 54, 60, 110 Utopian model, 58 utopian socialists, 66 Vespasian, 77 violence, and state, 21–2 Wealth of Nations, 137, 138 Weber, M., 26, 27, 32 Werner, S., 120 Western state, 4, 17–25 William of Ockham, 74 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 100 women, 20, 51–2 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 166n2, 167ns7–8, 169n14, 170ns15, 2, 171ns2, 5, 9, 172ns7–8 ‘workman-philosopher’, 95 works on political theory, 2–4, 39–40 World Bank, 157 Wyclif, John, 74

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