Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood
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and material well-being.
Some political theorists offer blueprints for an ideally just state. Others specify reforms of existing government and proposals for guiding public policy. For all of them, the central questions have to do with who should govern and how, or what form of government is best; and they generally agree that it is not enough to ask and answer questions about the best form of government: we must also critically explore the grounds on which such judgments are made. Underlying such questions is always some conception of human nature, those qualities in human beings that must be nurtured or controlled in order to achieve a right and proper social order. Political theorists have outlined their human ideals and asked what kind of social and political arrangements are required to realize this vision of humanity. And when questions such as these are asked, others may not be far off: why and under what conditions ought we to obey those who govern us, and are we ever entitled to disobey or rebel?
These may seem obvious questions, but the very idea of asking them, the very idea that the principles of government or the obligation to obey authority are proper subjects for systematic reflection and the application of critical reason, cannot be taken for granted. Political theory represents as important a cultural milestone as does systematic philosophical or scientific reflection on the nature of matter, the earth and heavenly bodies. If anything, the invention of political theory is harder to explain than is the emergence of natural philosophy and science.
In what follows, we shall explore the historical conditions in which political theory was invented and how it developed in specific historical contexts, always keeping in mind that the classics of political theory were written in response to particular historical circumstances. The periods of greatest creativity in political theory have tended to be those historical moments when social and political conflict has erupted in particularly urgent ways, with far-reaching consequences; but even in calmer times, the questions addressed by political theorists have presented themselves in historically specific ways.
This means several things. Political theorists may speak to us through the centuries. As commentators on the human condition, they may have something to say for all times. But they are, like all human beings, historical creatures; and we shall have a much richer understanding of what they have to say, and even how it might shed light on our own historical moment, when we have some idea of why they said it, to whom they said it, with whom they were debating (explicitly or implicitly), how their immediate world looked to them, and what they believed should be changed or preserved. This is not simply a matter of biographical detail or even historical ‘background’. To understand what political theorists are saying requires knowing what questions they are trying to answer, and those questions confront them not simply as philosophical abstractions but as specific problems posed by specific historical conditions, in the context of specific practical activities, social relations, pressing issues, grievances and conflicts.
The History of Political Theory
This understanding of political theory as a historical product has not always prevailed among scholars who write about the history of political thought; and it probably still needs to be justified, not least against the charge that by historicizing the great works of political theory we demean and trivialize them, denying them any meaning and significance beyond their own historical moment. I shall try to explain and defend my reasons for proceeding as I do, but that requires, first, a sketch of how the history of political thought has been studied in the recent past.
In the 1960s and 70s, at a time of revival for the study of political theory, academic specialists used to debate endlessly about the nature and fate of their discipline. But in general political theorists, especially in American universities, were expected to embrace the division of political studies into the ‘empirical’ and the ‘normative’. In one camp was the real political science, claiming to deal scientifically with the facts of political life as they are, and in the other was ‘theory’, confined to the ivory tower of political philosophy and reflecting not on what is but on what ought to be.
This barren division of the discipline undoubtedly owed much to the culture of the Cold War, which generally encouraged the withdrawal of academics from trenchant social criticism. At any rate, political science lost much of its critical edge. The object of study for this so-called ‘science’ was not creative human action but rather political ‘behaviour’, which could, it was claimed, be comprehended by quantitative methods appropriate to the involuntary motions of material bodies, atoms or plants.
This view of political science was certainly challenged by some political theorists, notably Sheldon Wolin, whose Politics and Vision eloquently asserted the importance of creative vision in political analysis.2 But at least for a time, many political theorists seemed happy enough to accept the place assigned to them by the ultra-empiricist ‘behaviouralists’ then dominant in US political science departments. It seemed especially congenial to the disciples of Leo Strauss, who formed an unholy alliance with the behaviouralists, each faction agreeing to respect the inviolability of the other’s territory.3 The empiricists would leave the philosophers in peace to spin their intricate conceptual webs, while the ‘normative’ theorists would never cast a critical eye at their empirical colleagues’ political analysis. The Straussian attack on ‘historicism’ was directed against other theorists, in self-proclaimed defence of universal and absolute truths against the relativism of modernity; and, although they would later emerge as influential ideologues of neoconservatism and as something like philosophical mentors to the regime of George W. Bush, Straussian political theorists of an earlier generation were on the whole content to pursue their reactionary and antimodernist (if not antidemocratic) political agenda on the philosophical plane – except when they ventured completely outside the walls of the academy to write speeches for right-wing politicians. Their ‘empiricist’ colleagues seem to have understood that Straussians, with their esoteric, even cabalistic philosophical preoccupations, represented no challenge to the shallowness and vacuity of ‘empirical’ political science.
Yet Straussians were not alone in accepting the neat division between empirical and normative, or between theory and practice. At least, there was a widespread view that grubbing around in the realities of politics, while all right for some, was not what political theorists should do. The groundbreaking work of the Canadian political theorist, C.B. Macpherson, who had introduced a different approach to the study of political theory by situating seventeenth-century English thinkers in the historical context of what he called a ‘possessive market society’, proved to be little more than a detour from the mainstream of Anglo-American scholarship.4 Scholars who studied and taught the history of political thought, the ‘classics’ of the Western ‘canon’, did not always subscribe to the Straussian variety of anti-historicism; but they were often even more averse to history. Many treated the ‘greats’ as pure minds floating free above the political fray; and any attempt to plant these thinkers on firm historical ground, any attempt to treat them as living and breathing historical beings passionately engaged in the politics of their own time and place, would be dismissed as trivialization, demeaning great men and reducing them to mere publicists, pamphleteers and propagandists.5
What distinguished real political philosophy from simple ‘ideology’, according to this view, was that it rose above political struggle and partisanship. It tackled universal and perennial problems, seeking principles of social order and human development valid for all human beings in all times and places. The questions raised by true political philosophers are, it was argued, intrinsically transhistorical: what does it mean to be truly human? What kind of society permits the full development of that humanity? What are the universal principles of right order for individuals and societies?
It seems not to have occurred to proponents of this view that even such ‘universal’ questions could be asked and answered in ways that served certain immediate political interests rather than others, or that these questions and answers might even be intended as passionately partisan. For instance, the