Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T12:56:43.027Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2020

Adrian Blau Open the ORCID record for Adrian Blau [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper proposes a new framework for categorizing approaches to the history of political thought. Previous categorizations exclude much research; political theory, if included, is often caricatured. And previous categorizations are one-dimensional, presenting different approaches as alternatives. My framework is two-dimensional, distinguishing six kinds of end (two empirical, four theoretical) and six kinds of means. Importantly, these choices are not alternatives: studies may have more than one end and typically use several means. Studies with different ends often use some of the same means. And all studies straddle the supposed empirical/theoretical “divide.” Quentin Skinner himself expertly combines empirical and theoretical analysis—yet the latter is often overlooked, not least because of Skinner's own methodological pronouncements. This highlights a curious disjuncture in methodological writings, between what they say we do, and what we should do. What we should do is much broader than existing categorizations imply.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , Winter 2021 , pp. 91 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

For comments and criticisms on previous versions of this article, I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers and to Ruth Abbey, the editor of this journal.

References

1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.3, p. 60Google Scholar.

2 Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), viiGoogle Scholar.

3 E.g., Martinich, A. P., The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 11–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 E.g., Rousseau, Social Contract, 4.2, p. 124; 1.7, p. 53.

5 Blau, Adrian, “History of Political Thought as Detective-Work,” History of European Ideas 41, no. 8 (2015): 1189–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Adrian Blau, introduction to Methods in Analytical Political Theory, ed. Adrian Blau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1.

7 Frazer, Michael, “The Ethics of Interpretation in Political Theory and Intellectual History,” Review of Politics 81, no. 1 (2019): 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Rorty, Richard, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193Google Scholar.

9 Klosko, George, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Klosko, George, The Development of Plato's Political Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–13, 33–264Google Scholar.

11 John Gunnell, “History of Political Philosophy as a Discipline,” in Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, 60–72.

12 Dunn, John, The History of Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19Google Scholar.

13 Ball, Terence, “History and the Interpretation of Texts,” in Handbook of Political Theory, ed. Gaus, Gerald and Kukathas, Chandran (London: SAGE, 2004), 19Google Scholar.

14 Terence Ball, “The Value of the History of Political Philosophy,” in Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, 49.

15 Ball, Terence, Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), chap. 3Google Scholar.

16 Ball, “History and the Interpretation of Texts,” 28.

17 Schulz, Daniel and Weiss, Alexander, “Introduction: Approaches in the History of Political Thought,” European Political Science 9, no. 3 (2010): 284–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Ibid., 284.

19 Ibid., 287.

20 Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 6–13Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 9.

22 Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes's ‘Leviathan,’” Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (1964): 331.

23 Skinner, Quentin, “Machiavelli's Political Morality,” European Review 6, no. 3 (1998): 324–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On systematic reconstruction, see Blau, Adrian, “Interpreting Texts,” in Methods in Analytical Political Theory, ed. Blau, Adrian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 251–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Pocock, J. G. A., “The History of Political Thought: a Methodological Enquiry,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, second series, ed. Laslett, Peter and Runciman, W. G. (Oxford: Blackwell), 187Google Scholar.

25 E.g., Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, in Gourevitch, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, 6, 8.

26 Rosenblatt, Helena, Rousseau and Geneva: From the “First Discourse” to the “Social Contract,” 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 255–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 247–48.

28 Pocock, J. G. A., “Theory in History: Problems of Context and Narrative,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. Dryzek, John, Honig, Bonnie, and Phillips, Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 164–72Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., 170–71.

30 Ibid., 168.

31 Ibid., 166–72.

32 Ibid., 172–73.

33 Rorty, Richard, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J. B., and Skinner, Quentin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 49–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 E.g., Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 118–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Martinich, A. P., Hobbes (London: Routledge, 2005), 101–4 and 153–72Google Scholar.

36 Williams, Bernard, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), xiii–xiv, 87–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Rosen, Michael, “The History of Ideas as Philosophy and History,” History of Political Thought 32, no. 4 (2011): 693–94, 700–701Google Scholar.

38 William Richter, “Introduction: The Study of Political Thought,” in Approaches to Political Thought, ed. William Richter (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 8.

39 Ibid., 9.

40 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 285; emphasis added. On textual analysis in “contextual” research, see also Blau, “History of Political Thought as Detective-Work,” 1190; Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 246; and Adrian Blau, “Textual Context in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History,” History of European Ideas 45, no. 8 (2019): 1191–1210.

41 Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan, 11–12.

42 Don Garrett, “Philosophy and History in the History of Modern Philosophy,” in The Future for Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 57–60.

43 See Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 251–57, on empirical and systematic reconstruction.

44 Blau, “History of Political Thought as Detective-Work,” 1179; Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 244–45, 258, 260, 264.

45 Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 260; see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 9.

46 Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 258.

47 Ibid., 251

48 Blau, “History of Political Thought as Detective-Work,” 1189–93.

49 I thank Maurizio Viroli for helping me to see these other categories.

50 Adrian Blau, “Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes: Historical and Philosophical,” in Interpreting Hobbes's Political Philosophy, ed. S. A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 11.

51 Devin Stauffer, Hobbes's Kingdom of Light: A Study of the Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 7–9.

52 Richard Tuck, “The Utopianism of Leviathan,” in Leviathan after 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 128, 288.

53 Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 255–56; Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 247–48.

54 A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

55 Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 254–56.

56 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989), xvi–xxvi.

57 Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2011), 35–36, 115–41.

58 Adrian Blau, “Meanings and Understandings in the History of Ideas,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 14, no. 2 (2020): 239–47.

59 Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau's Critique of Inequality: Reconstructing the “Second Discourse” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 14–15.

60 Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 8.

61 Adrian Blau, “Extended Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019): 350–51.

62 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 16–22.

63 E.g., Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6.

64 See, e.g., Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 10–13, 44–60, 80–87, 90–97.

65 Rousseau, Social Contract, 3.15, p. 113.

66 E.g., Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 247–58.

67 Blau, “Meanings and Understandings,” 244–47.

68 See also Blau, “Extended Meaning,” 353–54.

69 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ix.

70 Ibid., 216.

71 E.g., Quentin Skinner, “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. David Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 204–5; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101–20.

72 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 23.

73 Ibid., 45.

74 Ibid., 24.

75 Ibid., 112–15.

76 Ibid., 129–31.

77 Ibid., 128; see also 150.

78 Ibid., 132–38; quotation at 132.

79 Ibid., 116–23.

80 Ibid., 112–15.

81 Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 252–56; Blau, “Extended Meaning,” 352–58; Blau, “Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes”; Blau, “Textual Context.”

82 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 23.

83 Ibid., 34–37, 41–47, 50–55.

84 Ibid., 37–41, 47–50; see also 21–23, 25–34, and 56–81 for other contextual comparisons.

85 Ibid., 90.

86 Ibid., 90–107.

87 Ibid., 107–15.

88 Ibid., 132–38; 162–73.

89 Ibid., 138–62; 173–77.

90 Jeffrey Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense against Methodological Militancy,” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 435; emphasis removed.

91 Ibid., 435–36.

92 For a critique of Skinner's philosophical analysis, see Douglass, Robin, “Thomas Hobbes's Changing Account of Liberty and Challenge to Republicanism,” History of Political Thought 36, no. 2 (2015): 281–309Google Scholar.

93 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, xvi.

94 E.g., Dienstag, Joshua Foa, “Man of Peace: Hobbes between Politics and Science,” Political Theory 37, no. 5 (2009): 695–96, 703–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ball, “Value of the History of Political Philosophy,” 57; Cello, Lorenzo, “Taking History Seriously in IR: Towards a Historicist Approach,” Review of International Studies 44, no. 2 (2017): 240Google Scholar; David Boucher, review of Before Anarchy: Hobbes and His Critics in Modern International Thought, by Christov, Theodore, Hobbes Studies 31, no. 2 (2018): 227–28Google Scholar. For exceptions, see David Johnston, book review, Ethics 119:1 (2008), 202–3; McQueen, Alison, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 15–16Google Scholar.

95 E.g., Christopher Pierson, review of Hobbes and Republican Liberty, by Skinner, Quentin, Contemporary Political Theory 8, no. 4 (2009): 472–74Google Scholar; Pettit, Philip, “Freedom in Hobbes's Ontology and Semantics: A Comment on Quentin Skinner,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 1 (2012): 111–12, 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Browning, Gary, A History of Modern Political Thought: The Question of Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Melzer, Arthur, Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 288–324CrossRefGoogle Scholar.