Introduction

READING CLASSICAL TEXTS OF POLITICAL THOUGHT: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

In 1950, there were seventy-three sovereign countries in the world; by 1968, within a span of less than twenty years, some forty-nine newly independent nations had been added to the map of the world.¹ Therein lies the root of our attraction, some might even say, the root of our fatal attraction, for politics. Containing the tantalizing and enticing whiff of the new, politics enlarges our sense of self. Through politics, we can create new stories, or new worlds that we can now investigate. The Age of Discovery, with all its excitement of finding new lands, may be over, but with politics, the reaching out to the new remains an ever present possibility. In politics, this newness is not like the sudden disclosure of a new planet which had always existed as part of a solar system, instead it is the creation of something that did not exist before, by us, through our political action. The European Union is new, the Islamic Republic of Iran is (was) new, the women’s movement is new, and so on, with the assumption being that these political entities are not just new, but new and ‘better’ for many of us.

Politics seems to be one of the significant markers of human creativity, and in societies where this creativity often seems to bear fruit, as in a modernizing society, thinking about politics is a central concern. This book, however, is not only about political thinkers from modernizing societies; it also ranges over what political thinkers from the distant past said about politics, how they defined politics and what they took its main features to be. Did they, in their classic works, also talk about the transformative or creative role of politics?

A conversation with voices from the past is what an engagement with the history of political thought is. But why should we care about what was said about political institutions and political power in the past—the new political institutions the creation of which was advocated in the past—when the past is long gone? And it’s not even our past—why make so much effort, in studying the history of Western political thought, to recover the meaning of voices from someone else’s long gone past?

Well, we might be curious about that past. The past is a legitimate object of enquiry, pace the discipline of history. We read Plato and Aristotle to fulfil our antiquarian interests. We are curious about the Greek city-states of the pre-Christian era; we want to know about Athenian democracy and Spartan oligarchy and Republic and Politics help to satisfy that curiosity.

But we are not historians. We are political scientists trying to get our bearings amidst the intense political conflicts of today. We might not have much interest in the ancient Greeks; we puzzle instead, over the reasons for conflict in our societies, and we investigate ways of managing or resolving this conflict. How do we answer then, the question of the relevance of a work of political philosophy that was written in another time and place, to current politics? Have you at sometime come across an individual so immersed in her reading of Plato’s dialogues not because of any desire about Greece, but because, she says, reading Plato helps her to make sense of modern politics. Republic helps her to better comprehend the political arrangements of her own world; but how can a book about ancient Greek constitutions also be a book about contemporary politics? Or, to put it in slightly different terms, why are courses in the history of political thought part of the curriculum of a degree in political science in so many parts of the world?

In answering the question of why do we, or why should we, study the history of Western political thought, we find that we are led to address the problem of how do we study a tradition of political thought. These two questions are inextricably linked, and in considering one, we cannot but probe the other. So, how do we recover the meaning of what was said by these voices from the past? We have to first understand what it is that they said, to interpret the meaning of their words, before we can use their writings to either increase our knowledge of the past, or to better understand our own present-day conditions. Let me start, then, with the problem of methodology: how should we study the political thought of a particular thinker?

THE TEXTUAL METHOD

Let us take a well-known text, for instance, Hobbes’ Leviathan. How do we understand the meaning of what is written in this book? For a long time, the answer to such questions was provided by the textual method. The textual method has been described as insisting that given ‘the autonomy of the text itself as the sole necessary key to its own meaning,…the text itself should form the self-sufficient object of inquiry and understanding’.² To understand the meaning of the Leviathan, we only have to read it again and again, or if necessary, we should read it along with the corpus of Hobbes’ other writings. If the meaning of some passage in the Leviathan is unclear to us, we take the help of some other passage in the same work, or at the most, in some other book written by Thomas Hobbes. A study of political thought becomes, then, a systematic perusal of certain classic texts.

This method of studying the Western tradition of political thought came under attack, in the 1960s, by the members of the ‘Cambridge school’ who argued that since meaning can only emerge in a context, when we ignore the context by insisting on the autonomy of the text, what we do is to surreptitiously introduce our own context as a frame in which to put what the text says.³ We take the historical text to be answering our questions. So it’s not as if we have really respected the autonomy of the text; because meaning requires context, what we have done is to illegitimately frame the text in our context instead of its own context.

According to these critics, this has led to the canon of classic texts being taken to be providing answers to a number of set questions, like ‘what is justice’, or ‘what is the relationship between the citizen and the state’, or as I asked earlier, why is there conflict in human communities and how can we manage it, and so on. As each thinker is understood to be responding to these same ‘enduring’ and ‘abiding’⁴ questions, as important to us as to him, the discipline of political thought becomes a comparison of these answers given by different historical figures. Let’s look at a couple of examples: when we find Aristotle, discussing in the first few books of Nichomachean Ethics, the centrality of the concept of choice to the concept of moral action, and J.S. Mill, many centuries later, in On Liberty, making freedom of choice essential for the development of our moral and mental faculties, we take both philosophers to be grappling with the same issue, thus committing the fallacy of a liberal (mis)reading of Aristotle. Here is another, starker example: you might have come across a commentary on Plato in which he is presented as the first communist. To interpret Plato on property with allusions to Marx as if both these philosophers were dealing with the same (eternal) problem of property and power—is that not to make a serious interpretive error?

The assumptions underlying the textual method are blamed for the following exegetical problems. When it is presupposed that a political philosopher is trying to answer a certain set question, the meaning of everything she wrote is sought to be fitted in the framework of a doctrine, and any inconsistencies or contradictory statements of the philosopher are just ignored, instead of being taken as clues that the thinker might be trying to do something other than answer some ‘universal’ question. Critics have further argued that this textual method also leads us into making the mistake of conflating ‘the retrospective significance of a given historical work’ with ‘its meaning for the thinker himself’.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT METHOD

The textual approach was sought to be replaced by the social context method in the study of political thought. The contextual method holds ‘that it is the context “of religious, political, and economic factors” which determines the meaning of any given text, and so must provide “the ultimate framework” for any attempt to understand it’.⁵ If we apply this methodological principle to our earlier example, it follows that before reading Leviathan, we must know that in writing it, Hobbes was trying to intervene in the raging debate between the king’s faction and the parliamentary faction in England in the first half of the 17th century. When Leviathan was published in 1651, the English civil war had just come to a close, with the English king, Charles I, being executed in 1649. For the next eleven years, no king was allowed to take the throne. It was in these turbulent times that Leviathan was written, and unless we are aware of this political context, no number of readings of Leviathan will help us to understand its meaning.

Leviathan was a response to pressing political questions or political problems of the day. If we are unaware of these problems of 17th century English politics, we will take Leviathan to be answering our political concerns, and in this manner, completely misunderstand its meaning. Political philosophers of the past must not be taken to be addressing our political concerns; their political concerns are different, of their own time. We must not see the history of political thought as a series of different answers to the same questions; the questions themselves are different, these different questions emerging from specific historical circumstances.

In order to study political thought then, we require knowledge of history. We must place the writings of the political philosopher we are studying in the economic, social and political context in which she was writing. If ideas are ‘responses to immediate circumstances’ then we must know the nature of the society in which the thinker was writing. It is the use of the contextual method that allows a scholar like Macpherson, for instance, to read the work of Hobbes and Locke in the context of a changing economic system, and to interpret it as the work of ‘bourgeois’ thinkers.⁶ What the historical context is, may however, also be a matter of interpretation: we are familiar with Tully’s criticism of Macpherson for misinterpreting Locke’s conception of property by not seeing that the property that Locke was concerned to defend against the state was the property of the religious Dissenters, and not that of the ‘bourgeois’ rich. For Tully, to use ‘the “rise of capitalism” as the governing framework [context] for interpreting seventeenth-century political thought’,⁷ is to ensure misinterpretation of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. Looking at the text in context is also a matter of interpreting the context correctly. If we use modern categories to interpret the context, rather than the text, it is as if we are committing the same error. We cannot claim to be moving beyond the text to the context when we seek to understanding the historical context in our present-day categories. We have to read the past in its own terms.

When the textual method was attacked in the name of ‘the context’, its proponents began to fear for the classics. If the text was going to be reduced to its context, what need was there to read the classic texts? In their campaign to save the text, the advocates of the textual method began shifting the battle lines of the methodological debate. No one believed any longer (that is, if someone ever had) the ‘absurd notion’ that the classic texts ‘are self-sufficient objects of inquiry, which can be understood in isolation’. Having accepted that ‘we have to read even a great text in its context’, what was still pointed out was that—‘but we have to understand what its author understood that context to be, not insert it into some context constructed by our scholarship’.⁸ The question now was—how was the context to be understood? What should we mean by ‘the context’ became the new point of debate.

ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES

Although the textual method has been accused of committing the ‘most mistakes’ or leading to the ‘worst misunderstandings’ of a text, it is not as if the contextual approach, as we just saw above, does not have its own pitfalls. It is true that the contextual method makes us aware that we always approach a text with certain presuppositions. It is, as if, to guard against these presuppositions, that the contextual method warns us to situate the text in its own context. Many leading scholars of the art of interpretation have, while agreeing that meaning can only exist in context, however pointed out that it is humanly impossible to completely bracket our own presuppositions and our own questions. If it is true that contextualizing is an essential component of understanding, that understanding cannot take place without a context, then it is equally true that we cannot remove our own context from the picture. Hans-Georg Gadamer, an exponent of modern hermeneutics, for instance, argued that successful interpretation of meaning takes place through a ‘fusion of horizons’: a mingling of our own horizon with the horizon of the text makes it possible for an earlier text to have meaning for us.⁹

If it is the context of the text that makes it what it is, it is our context which makes us what we are. We learn to think and reason within a certain tradition, and the assumptions or presuppositions of this tradition mediate our grasp of what is written in the text. Instead of seeing these assumptions as hampering our understanding of the past, Gadamer believed that it is through these assumptions that we think, interpret and understand at all. We always bring our own questions to bear on the past; this does not imply that we read the canon of political philosophy as repositories of ‘timeless truths’ or ‘ageless wisdom’ but it does mean that we read Machiavellli’s Discourses not only because we want to know more about 16th century Florence, but because we want to use this book to increase our understanding of ourselves and of our political situation. In which way do these works of political thought add to our self-knowledge is a question that remains to be answered.

Gadamer believed that all human beings were part of an ‘effective history’, part, that is, of the same historical process. It is this shared belonging to the same historical process that allows our horizon to fuse with that of the past. In that sense, our presuppositions are not, as long as we are also aware of the text’s specific historical context, a hindrance to the understanding of the text, but actually an entry into the meaning of the text. What needs to be clarified here is whether this applies to those belonging to a particular tradition, lets say that the past and present of the people of the West forms one continuous history, or whether members of a different tradition, let’s say the people of Kenya and Tanzania, are also part of this same history, and will therefore have an entry point into the meaning of the Western tradition of political thought. (Did the previous era of globalization—the colonization and the labour migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—ensure one history for the world?) If they are not part of the same history, then how do they understand the work of an alien tradition, or do they misunderstand it? Moreover, when meaning is a variable determined by the fusing of two contexts, that of the writer and that of the reader, does it follow that for readers in different historical times, the meaning of the same text would be different—this conclusion seems to take us as far away as possible from the ‘autonomy of the text’ methodological thesis.

For members of the Cambridge school, on the other hand, going down the ‘fusion of horizons’ road of interpretation is to end up in a blind alley of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Remember, their main criticism of the textual method was that it allows us to frame a historical text anachronistically in our contemporary context. These scholars disagree with Gadamer that we should not try to bracket our own presuppositions because they allow the text to speak to us. This will lead, they argue, to a completely instrumental view of the text which they want to counter not with the idea of the autonomy of the text but with the idea of the autonomy or integrity of a socio-historical slice of time. (Would it follow that the categories of 17th century English political thought would be as alien to a 21st century English reader as to an Indian reader?)

The Cambridge school insists, then on the significance of the text’s historical context; where the social context approach goes wrong is in ignoring the most important historical context of a text—its linguistic context. In different historical periods, a certain political language is dominant, and we have to become familiar with this political discourse before we can interpret a particular text from that time.

The contextual method has thus been faulted by the Cambridge school for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As one critic puts it, while ‘a study of social context may help in the understanding of a text’, ‘the fundamental assumption of the contextual methodology, that the ideas of a given text should be understood in terms of its social context, can be shown to be mistaken, and to serve in consequence not as a guide to understanding…’¹⁰ If the meaning of the text is produced wholly by the social context, then why should we read the text at all? Often you will find yourself being exhorted not just to read about Hobbes but to read Hobbes himself. But if the meaning of Leviathan can be reduced to its context, then why do we bother with Leviathan itself?

If we reduce the text to the social context, then we will, Skinner argues, lose the point of what is being said in the text. Skinner tries to replace the central concept of the ‘social context’ with his conception of the ‘linguistic context’. Again, what is the linguistic context of a text? For every philosopher in question, a certain language of politics is available to him in which he understands the political questions of his day. For instance, when Locke used the word ‘trust’ or the phrase ‘government by consent’, these words had a specific meaning at that time, which we must know in order to decipher the meaning of these terms in Locke’s writings.

When we become familiar with the dominant political conceptions of a particular time, only then can we also understand the original contribution of a political philosopher, because we can see then how he deviated from the dominant political ideas. As has famously been shown in the case of Machiavelli, it was Machiavelli’s use of the term ‘virtu’, a dominant idea of Renaissance Italy, with a completely different meaning given to it by him, which ensures that today we still read Machiavelli and leave the many others who also wrote advice books for princes in 15th–16th century Italy to specialist historians.

For Skinner, to understand a statement is to know more than its meaning; it is to also grasp the illocutionary force¹¹ of that statement. It is knowledge of the linguistic context—how words were used at that time—that allows us to grasp the illocutionary force of an utterance. By making these statements political thinkers were not just saying something, they were doing something, since ‘to make a statement is to perform an action’. Given this theory of linguistic action or of speech acts, the meaning of their statements must include the use they wanted to make of the statements and this can only be revealed by knowing the linguistic context of the time.

CONCLUSION

We have looked at four positions on the interpretation and relevance of ‘political writing in past time’. Briefly, and simplistically, if the textual method’s advice is to read and reread the text carefully and we will find it answering our questions, the social context method asks us instead to make the economic and social context of the work a priority, using modern categories to interpret that historical context. For Gadamerian hermeneutics, our reading of the text must be informed by a true intermingling of contexts. For the Cambridge school, when we interpret a 16th century text through a familiarity with its linguistic context, keeping our own presuppositions out, we realize that the writer is using political terms with meanings specific to that time. Coming back to the question of why we study the history of political thought, this does not mean that it is an irrelevant exercise, that the text has no relevance for us. It is its difference—how the political concerns of that time were different—that makes the text relevant to us, not the fact that its author was asking the same questions about politics as us. ‘The classic texts, especially in social, ethical, and political thought, help to reveal—if we let them—not the essential sameness, but rather the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitments.’¹² Approaching the texts in this way, ‘knowledge of the history of such ideas can then serve to show the extent to which those features of our own arrangements which we may be disposed to accept as traditional or even “timeless” truths may in fact be the merest contingencies of our peculiar history and social structure’.¹³ Such a consciousness allows us to develop a critical perspective with respect to our own society and to see what can be changed in it. Instead of seeing the history of political thought as a series of mistakes, as a series of unsuccessful attempts to answer our questions—we cannot use Plato’s organic conception of the state to defend individual rights; we cannot use Rousseau’s conception of direct democracy in contemporary large nation-states—we can use the work of earlier political thinkers to query our contemporary institutions—the centrality of labour in our lives, the overriding concern with consumption and therefore with production, and the modern bureaucracy as such an integral part of the contemporary democratic state.

Is that how the work of earlier political philosophers is used in contemporary political theory? What are we to make of a political theorist, like Martha Nussbaum for example, making self-consciously Aristotelian arguments to throw light on contemporary political arrangements? Political theory today abounds with Aristotelians, Lockeans, Hegelians and Nietzscheans. In terms of method, how are we to interpret someone calling himself a Lockean today? Does that person read the Two Treatises on Government to understand how different our politics is, or does he read it in terms of a common political language between the past and the present? When a theorist argues for more attention to Hellenistic philosophy today on the grounds that ‘the writings of modern writers as diverse as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Adam Smith, Hume, Rousseau, the Founding Fathers of the United States, Nietzsche, and Marx, owe in every case a considerable debt to the writings of Stoics, Epicureans, and/or Skeptics, and frequently far more than to the writings of Plato and Aristotle’,¹⁴ is she claiming that the linguistic context of any modern political philosopher, whether it is Nietzsche or herself, is partly inherited from the past? Where does the linguistic context of any philosopher come from? Nussbaum argues for the importance of both ‘the historical and the literary context’, pointing out that even though Roman writers like Cicero were greatly influenced by the Greek Stoics, their own work has to be understood to be ‘standing in an intimate relation to Roman history and politics’.¹⁵ The influence of the philosophical tradition of the past is always refracted by the theorist’s own historical situation. The same questions would arise for those of us who are from India, or China, or Africa, reading the canon of Western political thought.

Just because in this book, a series of thinkers are chronologically arranged in successive chapters, we should not take this to mean that each of these thinkers has provided us with successively better designed new political institutions, since some of these political institutions seem to be based on opposing ideals. Nor are we to take the later writers as providing us with a better approximation of the general idea of politics. In fact, they provide us with radically different conceptions of politics, or we can say that they make us familiar with radically different ways of legitimizing political power. It is interesting to see the reasons given to legitimate political rule changing over time. If at an earlier moment, political rule was linked to the idea of the development of virtue, at another later moment, it begins to be legitimated by the idea of its protection of individual liberty. If, in earlier times, the language of virtue was used to discuss political institutions, later this discussion comes to be couched in the language of liberty and the rights of the individual. This change in the political concepts justifying political authority also led to a questioning of the harmony between an individual’s interests and the interests of others. Virtue talk assumed the priority of the public good for the fulfilment of an individual’s private interests; but the language of rights seemed to construct the public good as the sum of individual interests.

Politics brings about change; if our goal is human happiness or human welfare, we can use politics as an instrument to change things in that direction. In ancient Greek political thought, for example, the political community was to be organized to create virtue amongst its citizens because that was seen as the road to happiness. Individuals needed to be part of a community to lead happy lives; the community can only exist if its members behave virtuously; for the community to be sustainable over time, its members’ virtue must be continuously encouraged. The community seems to depend on something—its members’ sense of virtue—that it itself plays a role in creating. The community which is organized politically in the right manner will be able to create virtuous citizens. In Greek political thought, however, as we will see later in the chapter on Plato, we also find a conception of virtue leading to happiness not through the political community but because virtuous individuals have healthy souls. But the legitimating principle of political authority remains its link to virtue.

We find the legitimating principle of political authority changing over time. The goal remains individual happiness, but virtue does not get us there; instead, this role is taken over by individual rights. We ensure a greatest chance of happiness for individuals in that regime which is best at protecting individual rights—political authority is legitimated by the idea of individual rights. Do we study the history of Western political thought, then, to see how the legitimating principles of political order change? There was a time in the history of the West when happiness was seen as an attribute of another world, of life after death, and in that case, nothing much could be expected from politics. If happiness was available only in union with God, and that too after death, then all aspects of the human world, including politics, counted for nought. A variation on this way of thinking is to argue that when people are dying of poverty and disease, and happiness is equated with domination, hedonism and consumerism, then happiness is not of much value, and politics in the service of this kind of happiness is also not worth the effort. This is not to claim that the human world can never match the value (happiness) of the so called heavenly world, but that what we have made of the human world so far makes it imperative for us to create something else, something different, something new. These changes in the history of Western political thought make us aware of or clearer about, what counts as a defensible view of human happiness today, and how is it related to the organization of political power.

In answering the question of how is, or why should the business of political design be relevant to human concerns, political thinkers from the past help us to look anew at how we think of this question today. In fact, one suggestion has been, as we saw, that it is because they provide us with a snapshot of different ways of organizing our collective life that they are useful to us. To believe that our present was unfolding in the past, or that our present was contained in the past and therefore the past has inexorably led up to our present, is not the same as maintaining that the whole purpose of the past was to lead up to our present. The last proposition belongs to a teleological conception of the historical world, and holding on to it would lead us to make the unjustifiable claim that it was the goal or intention of earlier political thinkers, in writing their ‘great works’ to solve our contemporary political problems. They were grappling with their own political problems, given to them by their own circumstances, and they grasped these problems in their own concepts. These conceptual grids are taken by some to have changed radically over time, although others argue that some of these political concepts have travelled through time.

What I have tried to do in this chapter is to show how debatable these questions still are—how do we study the history of political thought; why do we study it at all; what is it a study really of ? Before you start your reading of Plato or Rousseau, or as you study them, you should think about these three questions and try to work out your own answers to them because these answers will affect your interpretation and understanding of the meaning of their writings. I am not asking you to get bogged down in methodological issues, which seem to have become the bane of social scientists, but to keep some of these issues in mind.

NOTES

1. Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World 1950–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 36.
2. J. Tully, Meaning and Context—Quentin Skinner and his Critics, Polity, 1988, pp. 29–30, (emphasis in original).
3. Q. Skinner, J.M. Dunn, and J.G.A. Pocock are loosely said to belong to the Cambridge school because while teaching at Cambridge University, they shared similar positions on historical interpretation.
4. See L. Strauss and J. Cropsey (eds.), History of Political Philosophy (3rd edition), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. xiii.
5. J. Tully, Meaning and Context—Quentin Skinner and His Critics, Polity, 1988, p. 30, (emphasis in original)
6. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
7. J. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 127
8. See N. Tarcov and T.N. Pangle, ‘Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy’, in L. Strauss and J. Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy, pp. 913–914.
9. See the ‘Introduction’ in Robert J. Dostal (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
10. J. Tully, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, Polity, 1988, p. 59, (emphasis in original).
11. For a discussion of the relationship between the illocutionary force of a sentence and its meaning, see Q. Skinner, Chapter 7 in Visions of Politics–Vol. I – Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
12. J. Tully, Meaning and Context—Quentin Skinner and His Critics, Polity, 1988, p. 67.
13. Ibid., p. 67.
14. M.C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire—Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 4, emphasis mine.
15. M.C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire—Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, p. 7.