Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood
more. A tradition may cross national boundaries and even continents. It may be a particular literary genre fairly limited in time and geographic scope, like the ‘mirror-for-princes’ literature, which Skinner very effectively explores to analyze the work of Machiavelli; or, notably in the case of John Pocock, it may be the discourse of ‘commercial society’ which characterized the eighteenth century, or the tradition of ‘civic humanism’, which had a longer life and a wider scope. But whatever its duration or spatial reach, the tradition of discourse plays a role in analyzing political theory hardly different from the role played by particular episodes (which are themselves an interplay of discourses), like the Engagement Controversy in which Skinner situates Hobbes, or the Exclusion Crisis which others have invoked in the analysis of Locke. In both cases, contexts are texts; and at neither end of the Cambridge historical spectrum, from the very local episode to the long and widespread tradition of discourse, do we see any sign of historical movement, any sense of the dynamic connection between one historical moment and another or between the political episode and the social processes that underlie it. In effect, long historical processes are themselves converted into momentary political episodes.
In its conception of history, the Cambridge School has something essential in common with more fashionable ‘postmodernist’ trends. Discourse is for both the constitutive, indeed the only, practice of social life; and history is dissolved into contingency. Both respond to ‘grand narratives’ not by critically examining their virtues and vices but by discarding historical processes altogether.
The Social History of Political Theory
The ‘social history of political theory’, which is the subject of this book, starts from the premise that the great political thinkers of the past were passionately engaged in the issues of their time and place.12 This was so even when they addressed these issues from an elevated philosophical vantage point, in conversation with other philosophers in other times and places, and even, or especially, when they sought to translate their reflections into universal and timeless principles. Often their engagements took the form of partisan adherence to a specific and identifiable political cause, or even fairly transparent expressions of particular interests, the interests of a particular party or class. But their ideological commitments could also be expressed in a larger vision of the good society and human ideals.
At the same time, the great political thinkers are not party hacks or propagandists. Political theory is certainly an exercise in persuasion, but its tools are reasoned discourse and argumentation, in a genuine search for some kind of truth. Yet if the ‘greats’ are different from lesser political thinkers and actors, they are no less human and no less steeped in history. When Plato explored the concept of justice in the Republic, or when he outlined the different levels of knowledge, he was certainly opening large philosophical questions and he was certainly in search of universal and transcendent truths. But his questions, no less than his answers, were (as I shall argue in a subsequent chapter) driven by his critical engagement with Athenian democracy.
To acknowledge the humanity and historic engagement of political thinkers is surely not to demean them or deny them their greatness. In any case, without subjecting ideas to critical historical scrutiny, it is impossible to assess their claims to universality or transcendent truth. The intention here is certainly to explore the ideas of the most important political thinkers; but these thinkers will always be treated as living and engaged human beings, immersed not only in the rich intellectual heritage of received ideas bequeathed by their philosophical predecessors, nor simply against the background of the available vocabularies specific to their time and place, but also in the context of the social and political processes that shaped their immediate world.
This social history of political theory, in its conception of historical contexts, proceeds from certain fundamental premises, which belong to the tradition of ‘historical materialism’: human beings enter into relations with each other and with nature to guarantee their own survival and social reproduction. To understand the social practices and cultural products of any time and place, we need to know something about those conditions of survival and social reproduction, something about the specific ways in which people gain access to the material conditions of life, about how some people gain access to the labour of others, about the relations between people who produce and those who appropriate what others produce, about the forms of property that emerge from these social relations, and about how these relations are expressed in political domination, as well as resistance and struggle.
This is certainly not to say that a theorist’s ideas can be predicted or ‘read off’ from his or her social position or class. The point is simply that the questions confronting any political thinker, however eternal and universal those questions may seem, are posed to them in specific historical forms. The Cambridge School agrees that, in order to understand the answers offered by political theorists, we must know something about the questions they are trying to answer and that different historical settings pose different sets of questions. But, for the social history of political theory, these questions are posed not only by explicit political controversies, and not only at the level of philosophy or high politics, but also by the social pressures and tensions that shape human interactions outside the political arena and beyond the world of texts.
This approach differs from that of the Cambridge School both in the scope of what is regarded as a ‘context’ and in the effort to apprehend historical processes. Ideological episodes like the Engagement Controversy or the Exclusion Crisis may tell us something about a thinker like Hobbes or Locke; but unless we explore how these thinkers situated themselves in the larger historical processes that were shaping their world, it is hard to see how we are to distinguish the great theorists from ephemeral publicists.
Long-term developments in social relations, property forms and state-formation do episodically erupt into specific political-ideological controversies; and it is undoubtedly true that political theory tends to flourish at moments like this, when history intrudes most dramatically into the dialogue among texts or traditions of discourse. But a major thinker like John Locke, while he was certainly responding to specific and momentary political controversies, was raising larger fundamental questions about social relations, property and the state generated by larger social transformations and structural tensions – in particular, developments that we associate with the ‘rise of capitalism’. Locke did not, needless to say, know that he was observing the development of what we call capitalism; but he was dealing with problems posed by its characteristic transformations of property, class relations and the state. To divorce him from this larger social context is to impoverish his work and its capacity to illuminate its own historical moment, let alone the ‘human condition’ in general.
If different historical experiences give rise to different sets of problems, it follows that these divergences will also be observable in various ‘traditions of discourse’. It is not, for instance, enough to talk about a Western or European historical experience, defined by a common cultural and philosophical inheritance. We must also look for differences among the various patterns of property relations and the various processes of state-formation that distinguished one European society from another and produced different patterns of theoretical interrogation, different sets of questions for political thinkers to address.
The diversity of ‘discourses’ does not simply express personal or even national idiosyncrasies of intellectual style among political philosophers engaged in dialogue with one another across geographical and chronological boundaries. To the extent that political philosophers are indeed reflecting not only upon philosophical traditions but upon the problems set by political life, their ‘discourses’ are diverse in large part because the political problems they confront are diverse. The problem of the state, for instance, has presented itself historically in different guises even to such close neighbours as the English and the French.13
Even the ‘perennial questions’ have appeared in various shapes. What appears as a salient issue will vary according to the nature of the principal contenders, the competing social forces at work, the conflicting interests at stake. The configuration of problems arising from a struggle such as the one in early