ed from it and more readily communicated. To write a textbook in the history of ideas, of course, is simply to fall prey systematically to this temptation which, incidentally, is why textbooks in the subject are not merely poor things, but are actively misleading, and why this difficulty is not to be circumvented even by providing textbooks in which the "message" is given in the author's own words. The inevitable result which can be illustrated from far more respectable sources than the synoptic and pedagogic histories will still be a form of writing which might be labelled the mythology of coherence. The writing of the history of ethical and political philosophy is pervaded by this mythology.69 Thus if "current scholarly opinion" can see no coherence in Hooker's Laws, the moral is to look harder, for "coherence" is surely "present."70 If there is doubt about the "most central themes" of Hobbes's political philosophy, it becomes the duty of 'the exegete to discover the "inner coherence of his doctrine" by reading the Leviathan a number of times, until in a perhaps excessively revealing phrase he finds that its argument has "assumed some coherence."'7' If there is no coherent system "readily accessible" to the student of Hume's political works, the exegete's duty is "to rummage through one work after another" until the "high degree 69. A similar point about the problem of accommodating different "levels of abstraction" has been made by J. G. A. Pocock, "The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry," in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series, ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford, 1962), 183-202. This "scripturalist tendency" is also mentioned by Peter Laslett sub "Political Philosophy, History of," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards et al., 8 vols. (New York, 1967), VI, 371. 70. Arthur S. McGrade, "The Coherence of Hooker's Polity: The Books on Power," Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963), 163. 71. Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford, 1957), vii. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.210 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 06:00:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 17 of consistency in the whole corpus" is duly displayed (again in a rather revealing phrase) "at all costs."72 If Herder's political ideas are "rarely worked out systematically," and are to be found "scattered throughout his writings, sometimes within the most unexpected contexts," the duty of the exegete again becomes that of trying "to present these ideas in some coherent form."73 The most revealing fact about such reiterations of the scholar's task is that the metaphors habitually used are those of effort and quest; the ambition is always to "arrive" at "a unified interpretation," to "gain" a "coherent view of an author's system."74 This procedure gives the thoughts of various classic writers a coherence, and an air generally of a closed system, which they may never have attained or even been meant to attain. If it is first assumed, for example, that the business of interpreting Rousseau's thought must center on the discovery of his most "fundamental thought," it will readily cease to seem a matter of importance that he contributed over several decades to several quite different fields of enquiry.75 Again, if it is first assumed that every aspect of Hobbes's thought was designed as a contribution to the whole of his "Christian" system, it will cease to seem at all peculiar to suggest that we may turn to his autobiography to elucidate so crucial a point as the relations between ethics and political life.76 Again, if it is first assumed that even Burke never essentially contradicted himself or changed his mind, but that a "coherent moral philosophy" underlies everything he wrote, then it will cease to seem at all unrealistic to treat "the corpus of his published writings" as "a single body of thought."77 Some measure of the lengths to which such procedures of abstracting the variety of a man's thoughts to the level at which they can be said (all passion spent) to "attain" some coherence is provided by a recent study of Marx's social and political thought. Here it has seemed necessary, to justify the exclusion of Engels's thoughts, to point out that Marx and Engels were after all "two distinct human beings."78 It does sometimes happen, of course, that the aims and successes of a given writer may remain so 72. John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York, 1963), v-vi. 73. F. M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought (Oxford, 1965), xix. Cf. also 139. 74. E.g., J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas (London, 1965), 10. 75. Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, tr. and ed. Peter Gay (Bloomington, Indiana, 1954), 46, 62. As Gay indicates in his Introduction, it may well have been salutary at the time when Cassirer was writing to have insisted on such an emphasis, but it remains questionable whether the somewhat a priori assumptions of the study are not misconceived. 76. F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1964), 28. 77. Charles Parkin, The Moral Basis of Burke's Political Thought (Cambridge, 1956), 2, 4. 78. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968), 3. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.210 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 06:00:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas

Volume I: General Introduction Acknowledgments Notes on the text 1. Introduction: seeing things their way 2. The practice of history and the cult of the fact 3. Interpretation, rationality and truth 4. Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas 5. Motives, intentions and interpretation 6. Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts 7. 'Social meaning' and the explanation of social action 8. Moral principles and social change 9. The idea of a cultural lexicon 10. Retrospect: Studying rhetoric and conceptual change. Volume II. 1. Introduction 2. The rediscovery of republican values 3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government 4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics 5. Republican virtues in an age of princes 6. Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance of liberty 7. The idea of negative liberty: Machiavelli and modern perspectives 8. Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility 9. Was there a Calvinist theory of revolution? 10. Moral ambiguity and the renaissance art of eloquence 11. John Milton and the politics of slavery 12. Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war 13. From the state of princes to the modern state 14. Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought. Volume III: 1. Introduction: Hobbes's career in philosophy 2. Hobbes and the studia humanitatis 3. Hobbes's changing conception of a civil science 4. Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality 5. Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state 6. Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty 7. Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter 8. History and ideology in the English revolution 9. The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation 10. Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy 11. Hobbes and his disciples in France and England 12. Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society 13. Hobbes's last word on politics.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/13686/frontmatter/9780521813686_frontmatter.pdf

Visions of Politics

This article proposes a greater emphasis upon the intellectual history of political studies in the UK. The limitations of conventional understandings of the disciplinary past are considered in relation to the 1950s and 1960s. The author seeks to challenge contemporary views of this period in two respects. First, he shows how the key institutions of the emergent discipline were formed for highly contingent reasons, and how they were underpinned by a disciplinary ethos that was inherited from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Second, he draws attention to an important, and neglected, shift in disciplinary self-understanding in the late 1950s and 1960s, as figures like W. J. M. Mackenzie blended aspects of the dominant approach to political inquiry with newer ideas, thus generating an influential conception of a distinctively British political science.

The Case for Disciplinary History: Political Studies in the 1950s and 1960s

While existing disciplinary histories of political science focus on areas such as the development of research agendas, establishment of chairs and the founding of subject associations, little work ...

/pdf/the-emergence-of-politics-as-a-taught-discipline-at-1ts2psxwc2.pdf

The emergence of politics as a taught discipline at universities in the United Kingdom

During the 1950’s a change of direction within the study of politics was taking place. A new orthodoxy in political studies was evolving and new directions were being indicated which concerned a shift in focus towards the social sciences rather than history or philosophy. In sum, expectations and assumptions were changing in the academic community of politics lecturers and of course within the wider spheres of culture and political practice.

Oxford and the Emergence of Political Science in England 1945–1960

I N recent years several new editions of the texts of the great political theorists have appeared, some of them critical editions such as T. M. Knox’s edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1942) or Sir Ernest Barker’s edition of the Politics of Aristotle (1946) or the definitive edition of Tocqueville’s works now in progress;* others have appeared in the form of reprints such as those in Messrs. Blackwell’s series of texts or the series in which three of the four works here noticed appear; there have also been some notable contributions to the already great number of commentaries on political theories, for instance Robert DerathC’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la Science Politique de son temps (1950), Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History ( 1 953).2 and John Plamenatz’s German Marxism and Russian Communism (1954);4 and there have been some important contributions to the more extended history of political thought in, for instance. Maxime Leroy’s Histoire des IdPes Sociales en France (1946 et seq.). Paul Hazard’s La PensPe EuropPenne au XVl l le Si2cle ( 1946), and Mr. Zagorin’s book which is reviewed elsewhere in these pages5 My main purpose in this article is to ask what all this, particularly the texts, has to do with us; and I propose to do this. first by considering certain samples of the kind of material that is being made available, in the shape of these four editions of texts which have very recently appeared; second, by discussing the pIace of such texts in the reading of undergraduate students of politics; and third, by reviewing briefly

TEXTS IN POLITICAL THEORYa

‘THE rage of modern improvement’, said Blackstone in his inaugural lecture as Vinerian Professor at Oxford, has given rise to indiscriminate changes in the laws and hence to many mischiefs. What was this ‘improvement’? An early use of the word in a discussion of a social topic occurs in the chapter on property in Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Gdvernment. The ‘improvement of labour’, says Locke, ‘makes the greater part of the value of anything’. Adam Smith has a similar use in the Lectures on Police, Revenue, Justice and Arms: ‘Nature produces for every animal everything that is sufficient to support it without having recourse to the imErovement of the original production’; but ‘such is the delicacy of man alone that no object is produced to his liking. He finds that in everything there is need for improvement. . . . To improve and multiply the materials which are the principal objects of our necessities gives rise to all the variety of the arts.’ These are examples of economic improvement: the Federalist gives us examples of political improvement: ‘The science of politics, however, like most other sciences has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood which were either not known at all, or were imperfectly known, to the ancients; the introduction of legislative checks and balances; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their office during good behaviour; the representation of the people in the legislature; these are either wholly new discoveries or have made their principal progress’ to perfection in modern times.’ Sir James Mackintosh seems to be using ‘improvement’ in a similar sense when he says in the Vindiciae Gullicae: ‘No important political improvement was ever obtained in a period of tranquillity. . . . Whatever excellence, whatever freedom is discoverable in governments, has been infused into them by the shock of revolution.’ A’ different kind of ‘improvement’, however, seems to be found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and in Joseph Priestley. In the Wealth of Nations Smith finds that economic improvement is based upon the division of labour, which, in turn, is based on the slow and gradual development of the ‘propensity’ in human nature to ‘truck, barter and exchange’? In the Essay on the First Principles of Government Priestley says that God has ordained such a form of social development that man’s improvement is limitless; always ‘mankind in a later age are greatly superior to mankind in a former age’. Later, part of Priestley’s reply to Burke’s Reflections is that the American and French Revolutions represent the fulfilment of Isa. ii. 4 and Mic. iv. 3. The difference between the two types of meaning is fairly obvious. Improve-

A Note on ‘Improvement’ and ‘Progress’:

The Present State of Political Studies in Britain

anti-positivist redoubts The proposal to ‘expel ethical ideas from an approach to law’, and to have no truck with ‘abstract externally derived concepts’,1 rests on a doctrine which proceeds by curious leaps and bounds. It is clearly stated by Olivecrona and Lundstedt.z As a scientific discipline the study of law cannot concern itself with ends. ‘We like an end or we don’t. We strive for it. We are uninterested. We strive against it. That is all.” The rest is silence and psychology. From here it is argued that since legal phenomena are located in the world of time and space, and of cause and effect, any theory which sees in the binding force of law anything but a causal and psychological connexion is erecting an ‘ideological superstructure on objective real it^'.^ What is interesting from the point of view of terminology is that this makes Kelsen, the apostle of the pure theory of law, into an anti-positivist who has dabbled in a normative world and attempted to ‘lift law above the stream of social facts’.’ So far one crumb of comfort which political and legal theorists in this country might have gleaned has been their complete freedom from involvement in this type of argument. The attention given by British philosophers to prescriptive language in its moral context has had a good dcal to do with this. What is surprising is that until recently the effect of this preoccupation on jurisprudence has been so small? There is a clear opportunity here for students with interests in both politics and law (whatever they call themselves) to bring :i greater clarity into the ‘characteristic’ language of legal theory. Nothing, though, is made very much clearer or easier by beginning to wonder about what shall count as jurisprudence and what as political science. (We might.‘having been tempted into staking out two separate jurisdictions, perhaps find ourselves compelled to set up Professors Rees and Montrose (say) to function as a kind of inter-disciplinary tribunal des conpits.)

Wilfrid Harrison

Papers

TEXTS IN POLITICAL THEORYa

A Note on ‘Improvement’ and ‘Progress’:

The Present State of Political Studies in Britain

Some aspects of american political science7

The early years of political studies