Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood
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the study of political theory. Born in Germany in 1899, Strauss emigrated to the US in 1937 and, especially after his appointment to the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1949, exerted a great influence on the study of political theory in North America, producing a school of interpretation which would be carried on by his disciples and their students. The Straussian approach to political theory begins from the premise that political philosophers, who are concerned with truth and knowledge rather than mere opinion, have been compelled throughout the history of the canon to disguise their ideas, in order not to be persecuted as subversives. They have therefore, according to Straussians, adopted an ‘esoteric’ mode of writing, which obliges scholarly interpreters to read between the lines. This compulsion, the Straussians seem to suggest, has been aggravated by the onset of modernity, and particularly mass democracy, which (whatever other virtues they may or may not have) are inevitably dominated by opinion and, apparently, hostility to truth and knowledge. Straussians regard themselves as a privileged and exclusive fraternity in their access to the true meaning of political philosophy, taking enormous liberties of interpretation, which stray from the literal text in ways few other scholars would allow themselves. This approach tends, needless to say, to limit the possibilities of debate between Straussians and those outside the fraternity, since other interpretations of texts can be ruled out a priori as blind to hidden ‘esoteric’ meanings. However much Straussians may have denigrated ‘empirical’ political science, their method has reinforced the enclosure of ‘normative’ political theory in its own solipsistic domain.
4 The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, was published by Oxford University Press in 1962, but Macpherson had already published articles in the 1950s applying his contextual approach. Although I have disagreements with him and regard his ideal-type ‘possessive market society’ as a rather ahistorical abstraction, there can be little doubt that he broke important new ground.
5 See, for instance, Dante Germino, Beyond Ideology: The Revival of Political Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
6 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume I: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. xi.
7 Ibid., p. xiii.
8 Ibid., p. x.
9 See Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) p. 11.
10 J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 108. An elaboration of this argument on Pocock and ‘commercial society’ will have to await another volume devoted to the relevant period.
11 For a critical discussion of Skinner’s ‘atomized’ and ‘episodic’ treatment of history, see Cary Nederman, ‘Quentin Skinner’s State: Historical Method and Traditions of Discourse’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 18, No. 2, June 1985, pp. 339–52.
12 For a discussion of the term ‘social history of political theory’, see Neal Wood, ‘The Social History of Political Theory’, Political Theory, Vol. 6 No. 3, August 1978, pp. 345–67.
13 I have discussed these differences at some length in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1992).
14 Arlene Saxonhouse, in a review of M.I. Finley’s Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, writes dismissively of his approach as a ‘social historian’, which, apparently, can tell us a few unsurprising things about the predispositions of writers on slavery but cannot illuminate the deeper meaning of philosophical reflections such as those of Aristotle. ‘Aristotle’s reflections on the nature of slavery,’ she writes, ‘move us beyond a particular slave and a particular master. Instead, the slave’s subordination to the master reflects our own subordination to nature. Slavery is not only the degraded position of one without control over his or her labour. It is the condition of all humans vis-à-vis nature. The master and the slave is not a relationship limited to the slave societies of the ancient and modern world to which Finley refers. The master and slave are perennial states which Aristotle exhorts us to understand so that we may understand our own place within society and within nature. Finley, the social historian, turns our attention to the specifics of a time and a place, and that is why, though he notes the importance of the study of American slavery to American society today, he does not explain the relevance of ancient slavery. For that we must turn to the ancient philosopher’ (Political Theory, Vol. 9, No. 4, November 1981, p. 579). It is undeniable that Aristotle situates slavery in his all-embracing philosophical reflections on nature in general; but it seems perverse to deny that he is, in the process, reflecting on the very specific condition of slavery as he knew it in the Greek world. It might perhaps be possible to deny that Aristotle intends to justify slavery by treating it as a manifestation of humanity’s general subordination to nature (though we may be inclined, on the contrary, to think that this naturalization of slavery serves precisely as justification). But there is, in any case, something rather troubling about the view that a ‘philosophical’ interpretation of Aristotle, which detaches his discussion of slavery from the concrete realities of the master–slave relation in historical time and space, tells us more about ‘the relevance of ancient slavery’ (or, indeed, Aristotle’s views about it) than does mere ‘social history’, which treats the philosopher’s reflections as, precisely, reflections on ancient slavery, not as a metaphor but as an all-too-concrete historical
15 On the concept of ‘parcellized sovereignty’, see Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1974), pp. 148ff. English feudalism, as we shall see, represented a partial exception. All property was legally defined as ‘feudal’ and conditional; but the Anglo-Saxon state was already relatively unified, and the Normans would consolidate that unity, so that ‘parcellized sovereignty’ never existed in England to the extent that it did on the Continent. The distinctive development of English capitalism was not unrelated to this distinctive ‘feudalism’. But more on this later.
16 See Paul Cartlege, The Greeks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2002) for a masterful illustration of how our own political and cultural self-understanding can benefit from recognizing both the historical specificity of the Greeks and the continuities between them and us, both their ‘otherness’ and what we owe to them.
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THE ANCIENT GREEK POLIS
The Invention of Politics
In his play, The Suppliant Women, Euripides interrupts the action with a short political debate between a herald from despotic Thebes and the legendary Athenian hero, Theseus. The Theban boasts that his city is ruled by only one man, not by a fickle mob, the mass of poor and common people who are unable to make sound political judgments because they cannot turn their minds away from labour. Theseus replies by singing the praises of democracy. In a truly free city, he insists, the laws are common to all, equal justice is available to rich and poor alike, anyone who has something useful to say has the right to speak before the public, and the