Toward a Philosophical History of the Political
The past twenty years or so have witnessed a “return of the political,” a phrase now hackneyed by overuse.1 Such a return can be explained by the concurrence of two factors. First, it belongs to a moment in history: that of the rediscovery of the centrality of the question of democracy and of its problematic nature. Until the end of the 1960s, the vision of a central ideological divide served to organize intellectual space around the opposition between the two prevailing visions of the world: the Marxist and the liberal. The advocates of classical parliamentary democracy and the champions of “real” democracy both believed that the model whose merits they proclaimed corresponded to a fully realized ideal. In the 1970s, a new version of the critique of totalitarianism caused these convictions to be broken, allowing deeper analyses of the problem of democracy. Since the end of the 1980s, the need for a new social contract, in a context characterized by the rise of nationalism and the crisis of the welfare state, has prolonged this search, thus contributing to making the question of the political central once again. But the “return of the political” also has a methodological cause. It has gone hand in hand with the disenchantment with the social sciences that became apparent in the 1980s. With sociology or anthropology facing a kind of exhaustion, philosophy often seemed to offer a better way to both understand and formulate the difficulties of contemporary societies. It is within such a context that the emergence of what I call the philosophical history of the political is best appreciated.
This essay defends this new approach by making explicit the methodological elements and the underlying intentions of a number of my own publications, in particular L’État en France (1990) as well as Le Sacre du citoyen (1992).2 One threshhold point, however, comes first of all. The definition of a new philosophical history of the political rests on a definition of the political domain different from the one generally assumed by political science. For this inherited field, politics constitutes a subset of the social system as a whole. Max Weber, for instance, considered the political order, understood as the exercise of the monopoly of legitimate violence, to be different from the economic or the social order. Each sphere of activities is subject to institutions and regulatory principles of its own. One could mention many other definitions of what politics is, of course. But what characterizes the social sciences is that they view it in terms of its specificity: what distinguishes the political domain is the particular quality of power as a means of shaping the organization and the hierarchy of the social fabric.
Against this usual definition, the philosophical history of the political implies (as Claude Lefort has put it) “the notion that relations between human beings and the world are generated by a principle or body of principles.”3 Seen from this angle, it is not simply a matter of drawing a line between the political and the social, taking the symbolic dimension characteristic of society as the point of reference. If setting the political within this symbolic framework is hardly contestable (it leads, one can note in passing, to viewing the relationship between the political and the religious as fundamental), more precision is nonetheless required. But the very illuminating observations of Lefort help here, too, by defining the political as the set of procedures that institute the social. Interpreted in this way, the political and the social are indissociable, since the latter is given sense, is set up, and is staged by means of the former.
This definition of the political rests on a double premise. The first is the classical acknowledgment of the problematic nature of drawing up the rules whereby the community can live in peace, thus avoiding discord and its own ruin in the shape of a civil war. On this point, one can recall Aristotle’s classic definition in his Politics: “All men think justice to be a sort of equality…. But there still remains a question: equality of what? The question is an aporia and calls for political thought.”4 Understood in this way, politics defines a sphere of activities characterized by irreducible conflicts. The political stems from the need to establish a rule outside the ordinary, and one that cannot in any way be derived from a natural datum. The political can therefore be defined as the process that allows the constitution of an order accepted by all by means of deliberation about the norms of participation and distribution. “Political activity,” as Hannah Arendt observes in a similar vein, “depends upon the plurality of human activity…. Political activity is concerned with the community and with how being different affects the respective parties.”5
Such a “classical” definition of the political is still relevant. But it should also be stressed that it acquires a wholly new meaning in modern society. In Aristotle’s thought the problematic character of participation and distribution is kept within bounds by the belief in a certain natural order of things and society. In his view the system of differences is in part something already given. But modern society involves the extension, and one might even say the unleashing, of the political—and for two reasons.
The transition from a corporatist to an individualist society gave rise, in the first instance, to a kind of enormous deficit of representation. So the political is called upon to be the agent that “represents” a society to which nature no longer gives immediate form. According to Karl Marx, in the Middle Ages the social estates were immediately political.6 In modern societies, on the other hand, positive steps have to be taken in order for the representation of society to be instituted. Visible and tangible appearance has to be given to the society of individuals, and the people must be given a face. This imperative of representation therefore distinguishes modern from ancient politics. At the same time, one must draw attention to a second fundamental difference, one that stems from the principle of equality and is related to the advent of a conventional vision of the social (one implied by the equality of individuals as legal subjects). In modern society there are no longer fixed limits that either nature or history can impose on the work of equalization. Modern society is characterized by a revolution of equality that spells the end of all attempts to legitimate differences by appeal to a natural order of any kind. Social life is characterized by two processes, consisting not only of new claims for economic equality but also of the narrowing of anthropological differences. These two aspects of modernity lead thus to a considerable enlargement of the practical domain of politics in comparison to the Aristotelian vision.
Placed in this perspective, the aim of the philosophical history of the political is to promote an understanding of the way systems of representation, which determine the manner in which individuals or social groups conduct their activity and conceive communal life, are formed and evolve.7 On the assumption that these representations are born of a process whereby society constantly reflects on itself, and that they are therefore not exterior to the consciousness of actors, the philosophical history of the political aims primarily to relate how an epoch, a country, or a social group may seek to construct responses to what, with greater or less precision, they perceive as a problem. Second, it seeks to provide a historical account of the effort occasioned by the permanent interaction of reality and its representation by defining historicoconceptual fields. Its objective therefore is to identify the historical nodes around which new political and social rationalities organize themselves and representations of public life undergo change, in relation to the transformation of institutions and forms of regulation and connection. It is a philosophical history because it is through concepts that organize society’s self-representations—such as equality, sovereignty, democracy, etc.—that the intelligibility of social life and its change is made possible. Such a definition, finally, explains why two great historical “moments” are privileged by this approach. One is the loss of the autonomy of the social order understood as a corporatist body. The history of the political in this case is interested in the unraveling of an organic representation of society. The second is the democratic period that followed. These two great moments are very different from each other. One is the era of the birth of modern political forms, of the state, together with the emergence of the individual; the other is, more directly, the history of what one may call the “democratic experience.”
Contrary to the classical history of ideas, the material for this philosophical history of the political cannot be limited to an analysis of and the commentary upon the great texts, even though such texts, in certain cases, can justifiably be considered as poles around which the questions raised in a period of history as well as the answers that it sought to offer crystallized. The philosophical history of the political borrows from the history of mentalities the concern to incorporate the entirety of those elements that make up that complex object that any political culture is: the manner in which great theoretical texts are read, to be sure, but also literary works, the press and the movement of opinion, pamphlets and formal speeches, emblems and signs. More broadly still, the history of events and institutions has to be taken into account, so that, to this extent, no subject matter is really exclusive to this type of history of the political. It consists, then, in gathering together all those materials drawn upon, each in separate ways, by historians of ideas, of mentalities, of institutions, and of events. For example, the relationship between liberalism and democracy during the French Revolution does not simply consist of a kind of high-level debate between Rousseau and Montesquieu. One must make the effort to grasp what those who used these authors as authorities actually read in their works, study the mass of petitions sent to the National Assembly, immerse oneself in the world of pamphlets and satirical tracts, re-read parliamentary debates, and follow the proceedings of clubs and committees. It is also necessary to study the history of words and the development of language (the word “democracy” did not mean the same thing in 1789 as it did in 1793, for example). This kind of history is naturally pluralistic.
How does one analyze the multiplicity of these various levels? It is an important question because often the history of the political (when it is confused with the history of ideas) is reproached for being simply a history of the great writers. How to manage the rivalry between histories “from above” and “from below”? Here one must attempt to reanimate the meaning of the classical texts. If a certain number of texts appear to be crucial, they are so not just as expressions of thought, but also because they represent a philosophical and conceptual formalization of a specific historical, political, or philosophical moment.
The point is not to carry out a reading of The Social Contract in the style of Leo Strauss—as a strictly philosophical contribution. It is more interesting, rather, to show how The Social Contract represented one response to the problem of constructing the social order in the eighteenth century. If great texts enjoy a particular status in this history, it is because their peculiar quality is precisely that they capture the dimensions of a problem. But obviously one cannot restrict oneself to the great texts. If, for instance, one wants to understand how a vision of modern political representation originates, one cannot simply infer it from the Abbé Joseph Sieyès or Antoine Barnave alone, or even from the opposition between the archaic vision of representation of Montesquieu’s vision and its radical critique in Rousseau’s thought. For it is also necessary to analyze the way society at large addressed the same question, looking at pamphlets, iconography and songs. When I wrote Le Sacre du citoyen, I therefore tried not to separate the use of classical texts from that of material of a less “noble” intellectual origin. I sought, for example, to place the analysis of iconographic documents alongside a classical commentary on different texts.
In this sense, the philosophical history of the political represents an attempt to give new meaning to Fernand Braudel’s project of a total history. One must in fact move in the direction of a “total political history” in order to make sense of the political in all its complexity. Today the avenues by which history can renew itself are many. In this respect, contemporary debates on the frontiers between history and fiction, on the renewal of the biographical approach to the social, and on the renovation of micro-history are all significant. History lives off these methodological debates. The new philosophical history of the political must be understood within the framework of these major innovations within the discipline. It is this new history that takes over, in a different form, the old project of a total history: a history that refuses to separate, as a matter of principle, the different instruments of the various historical specialties. In this sense, the history of the political can draw from cultural history, from social history, from the classical history of political institutions, and from the history of ideas. What gives it unity, however, is not just the variety of instruments that it can bring to bear but its very object; it is the peculiarity of this object that distinguishes it from the other fields of history.
The originality of this philosophical history of the political, then, lies in both its approach and its content. Its approach is at the same time interactive and comprehensive. It is interactive because it analyzes the way the institutions and the events of a political culture combine to establish more or less stable political forms. It charts the convergences and divergences, the false starts and the blind spots, that characterize the creation of political forms and determine what makes them equivocal or ambiguous (or indeed what allows them to succeed). The philosophical history is also comprehensive, because its central objective is to understand an issue by placing it within the context of its emergence. Under these conditions it is impossible to maintain an objectivist approach presupposing that the historian can survey and control a passive object from without. The comprehensive approach seeks to apprehend history in the making, while it remains full of potential, before it becomes actualized in its completed and seemingly necessary form. “Understanding” (Verstehen in Max Weber’s sense) in the field of history implies reconstructing the way actors made sense of their situations, rediscovering the affinities and the oppositions from which they planned their actions, drawing the genealogies of possibility and impossibility that implicitly structured their horizon. It is a method, in a sense, based on empathy, because it presupposes the ability to address an issue by putting oneself within the situation from which it emerged. But it is naturally a form of empathy limited by the very distance that may allow one to understand the blind spots and the contradictions of actors and authors: a controlled empathy, so to speak.
These general comments on the definition of the content and the approach of a conceptual history of the political are not meant as a rejection of the traditional methods of the histories of ideas, of events, and of institutions—or of the more recent history of mentalities. Rather, they suggest a reassessment of their subject matter from a fresh perspective. Such a reassessment may in some instances entail the risk of reviving old approaches, particularly the history of ideas. This field has for so long been forsaken by French academics that it was often necessary to start from the most traditional historical reconstruction before attempting a more conceptual account of it. It is important, in this regard, to understand the connection between the history of the political and what has come to be known as the Annales school. The gap between the two that developed in the 1980s had an exaggerated appearance following from the inevitable sense of rediscovery that came from the reappraisal of a field of scholarship that had been neglected for far too long, so that the return to an earlier tradition of the history of ideas could briefly seem tantamount to a new approach to the political. The moment when the senses both of recovery and of innovation seemed to combine, however, is now at an end, and it is clear that the history of the political is one that fits into a perspective of extension and renewal of the French historical school, rather than breaking away from it altogether. The way forward is still uncertain and experimental. I can therefore well understand that this attempt can sometimes give the impression that it is one that opposes a “top-down” to a “bottom-up” history. This impression, however, remains the main obstacle in the way of the development of this ambitious project, whether it is considered in terms of its aims or its methods. A new path needs to be discovered to allow the philosophical history of the political to avoid becoming either a simple history of ideas, even an improved one, or mere political theory.
Far from being isolated from other fields of historical research, the history of the political is, on closer inspection, easily reconciled with them. In any case, certain traditional historians have themselves turned more and more to the political, as part of the intrinsic development of their own approaches. This is so in the case of social history, if one considers, for example, Jacques Julliard’s work.8 The same is true for the history of symbolism, as Pierre Nora’s undertaking in Les lieux de mémoire reveals.9 L’histoire de France, published by Le Seuil and edited by André Burguière and Jacques Revel, has also made for a fruitful exchange.10 The conditions for a productive dialogue, indeed for collaboration among historians, philosophers, and sociologists, have thus steadily emerged. Work with jurists has widened still further the possibilities for exchange. By its very nature, the study of the political requires taking diverse paths and the dismantling of narrow disciplinary boundaries.
I have described the sense in which the philosophical history of the political revives intellectual history while integrating it with other approaches. And what of political theory? My aim, from this perspective, is to heal the division between political theory and political history, so as to arrive at a point at which the two enterprises fuse. The reasons for this ambition are grounded in the important premise that history must be considered as material for political theory, an object of philosophical reflection. Hannah Arendt took this line, observing in Between Past and Future that “thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.”11 One of political thought’s major features is expressed in these lines: it is shaped first of all by a “relationship at once necessary, insurmountable and forever problematic with the experiences and the opinions actually present at any given time in the ‘real’ politics of polity.”12 In no way, then, can political theory be viewed as a “province” of general philosophy. Rather, it constitutes a particular manner of doing philosophy, since its issues arise directly from the life of the community, along with the totality of the arguments and controversies that run through it. From this perspective, it is necessary to insist that there is no political concept (whether democracy, liberty, or any other) that can be extricated from its articulation in history.
Understood in this way, political experience is indeed the subject matter of political theory, but it also follows that this subject matter is always in motion. Doing the history of politics thus turns out to mean reconstructing a search in which we, too, remain immersed in a sense. In fact, democracy is always at one and the same time the clear solution to the modern problem of the institution of society as well as a question forever left unanswered, in the sense that no conclusive and perfectly adequate response can ever be provided to it. The philosophical history of the political involves, therefore, a constant rethinking of the antinomies constitutive of the modern experience. What is called for is an attempt to unravel the historical thread of investigation and interrogation so as to understand history as it is made in a kind of collective experiment. In the end it is a matter of writing a history that one could term comprehensive.
The comprehensive approach depends on the premise that there is something enduring and constant between the situation of the author or actor under study and our own situation. For the Weberian sociologist, such a constant is that of human nature. In the case of a conceptual history of ideas, it is a function of our sense that we continue to be immersed in the questions whose path we are historically reconstructing. In this sense, the work of the historian can open the way toward a new type of intellectual commitment. To be sure, this engagement cannot involve transferring the preferred ideology or a priori assumptions of the present into a text or position from the past, nor is it a matter of reviving social groups or thinkers with whom the interpreter happens to sympathize. The aim, rather, is to turn conceptual history into a resource for understanding the present. The proposal is banal at first blush, some will justifiably say: the study of the past is always inspired by the need for light in the present. But considered more closely, matters are not quite so simple.
Many history books seek in fact rather to reinterpret history in terms of the present or even of the future as they imagine it. Such an inversion of the task of comprehension seems to me to be particularly striking in the field of political history. Take as an example the political history of the French Revolution. Alphonse Aulard’s book, which still remains the classic work of reference on the subject, offered an analysis of the political movement of the Revolution by constantly relating speeches and political institutions of the period to what he took to be the fixed and established democratic idea.13 Thus he traced the advances and the setbacks of democracy between 1789 and 1799 by reference to his own vision of democracy (government for the people and through universal suffrage). He makes judgments on this period by taking his present as the fixed point of reference. This sort of gradualist and linear history, with democracy equated to universal suffrage, takes as an extrahistorical given and an indisputable fact what is actually the shifting terrain to study: the gradual equation of the idea of democracy with the idea of the vote during the period. Aulard wrote as if the democratic idea already existed from the outset, prevented from full realization only by the ambient circumstances, the insufficient discernment of the actors involved, or the impact of the class struggle between the people and the bourgeoisie.
History read this way is always simple: it is the territory where opposing forces clash (action versus reaction, progress versus conservation, modern versus archaic, bourgeois versus popular). Their outcome explains the advances and the setbacks that the idea—itself insulated from history—enjoys or suffers. The past is judged from the standpoint of a present that is not itself historicized. Under these conditions, history becomes a genuine obstacle to the understanding of the present. The philosophical history of the political in its comprehensive form allows, in contrast, for dispensing with the barrier separating political history from political thought. Understanding the past and interrogating the present are part of the same intellectual agenda. The sort of philosophical history I am outlining also provides a meeting ground between commentary and scholarship, undertakings that are often portrayed as mutually exclusive. Scholarship is the vital condition of understanding of historical processes (the amount of information to be gathered and of texts to be read is, indeed, considerable when carrying out a comprehensive study), while commentary as a form of intervention in the present remains the motor driving the impulse to know and to understand. It is not an “engaged” history (understood as the simple projection of personal preferences and passions in the guise of scholarship). And it is not a Whig history (one that presents the past as the slow preparation for the realized present). Rather, it is a history of the resonances between our experience and that of past actors.
This way of conceiving the historian’s craft should lead to a reconsideration of the relationship between intellectual labor and civic and political involvement. The strength of this history of the political is that it conceives academic life in such a way that it becomes an integral part of the civic experience. It suggests, in effect, a new form of engagement. Such engagement is no longer determined by the position of the intellectual (the authority conferred upon him by his specialized knowledge); it is of a more substantive kind. In a certain sense, it is the very nature of intellectual labor that amounts to political engagement. If concern with civic life may take forms other than ordinary political combat, or the adherence to certain values or utopias, then it can also be thought of as the capacity to lucidly discern the aporias of the circumstances in which individuals find themselves and the questions that arise from them. If so, the work of the political historian is part and parcel of this civic process. Knowledge thus becomes a form of action. To such an extent, intellectual labor is a form of political practice. It is political understanding that, thanks to its contribution to the elucidation of the aporias of politics, participates in the attempt to define what properly belongs to the political domain. What is at stake here is the connection between erudition and involvement. The philosophical history of the political is able simultaneously to forge instruments of understanding and tools for practical involvement. The aim is to reach the point where the distinction between knowledge and action vanishes. It means participating in the process through which society might no longer separate knowledge about itself from intentional action on itself.
The project for a philosophical history of the political is thus based on a strong thesis. It claims to rebuild the relationship between intellectual labor and political life along new lines. Intellectual labor is not a form of “capital” available for reinvestment in another field thanks to the degree of visibility secured by academic fame (which by itself confers credibility to political discourse). Rather, it is the very content of the intellectual labor that has a civic dimension. To speak more personally, it is for such reasons that I do not detect any clear difference between what I write as part of a more direct political or social involvement and my more academic publications. Of course, there is a difference between an essayistic intervention and a developed work. But the essay is informed by the serious intellectual investment of the latter. Naturally there are very different levels and forms of writing. One can write as a scholar or as an essayist; one can also express oneself at different levels of complexity, by handling a quite varied range of sources. But I contend that one should not consider the short interpretative essay as fundamentally separate from the thick scholarly tome with the stamp of erudition, on condition, to be sure, that the same scholarly purpose nourishes both. For myself I endeavor to mix both genres. In this respect there is an experimental nature to my work. But above all, I try to write books about politics of a different kind in order to find ways of drawing together an interested concern for civic matters and academic work. This position, I readily acknowledge, is that of a small minority within academia, but this does not seem to me to make it less worthy of defense.
Having outlined this “program,” I should now attempt to answer a certain number of objections often aired against this approach, and to try to define with more precision its relation to other powerful scholarly practices. One of the main objections to the philosophical history of the political has been put forward by the historian Roger Chartier, who has criticized this “return of political” as a trite, idealistic attempt to restore the old philosophy of the free subject, whose luster had been somewhat tarnished by the social sciences.14 In his judgment, the philosophical history of the political mistakenly fails to distinguish between the discursive and the nondiscursive. Such a criticism would appear justified in the old campaign of the social sciences against the antiquated history of ideas. But it is the essence of the philosophical history of the political to consider that social representations cannot simply be assimilated to the order of ideology; they cannot be reduced, either, to prejudices reflecting a given state of social relationships. The philosophical history of the political maintains that beyond ideologies and prejudices there are positive representations that organize the intellectual field within which lies a certain range of possibilities at a given historical moment. These representations need to be taken seriously: they constitute real and powerful infrastructures in the life of societies. In contrast to an idealist vision, which disregards the economic and social determinants structuring the field of human action, this approach sets out to enrich and make more complex the notion of determination. Alongside “passive” representations, it is consequently necessary to take into account all those “active” representations—ones that determine the questions of the moment, shape practical responses to them, and give boundaries to the field of possibilities by establishing the parameters of thought and action.
Far from taking a principled stand against social history, then, this philosophical history of the political follows its very same program while adding to it. The “ideas” that it takes into account constitute an essential part of reality, provided these ideas are defined as I have outlined above. One can even argue that the approach takes as its object the most intimate and decisive matters of social experience. Indeed, in modern society the forms of collective life exist in a permanent and constitutive tension with representations, since the structure of society is no longer a product of either nature or history, but needs to be continuously constructed and criticized.
I do not reject, for such reasons, the endeavor of social history, preferring instead the company of great writers or parliamentary orators rather than the silent and long-suffering masses. And I do not at all disdain material history (which indeed I practice in my work). For example, it is important to trace the evolution of the hand-written ballot form or to be interested in the history of the voting booth (the so-called Australian ballot). But the facts of social history reveal their meaning only when they are placed within a context and inserted into a more conceptual kind of history, which for its part is not just an analysis of the great writers, even though the latter often represent a privileged window of access onto the political culture of their time. The relationship between social history and conceptual history is parallel to that between ordinary and revolutionary periods. The conflicts between the forces of progress and reaction, between the people and the elites, between the ruled and the rulers, the clash of vested interests and prejudices, constitute the everyday side of history, an everyday scenario tirelessly repeated and revisited through successive forms of obedience or domination and freedom or oppression. But this ordinary pattern acquires a meaning only when relocated within the process of transformation of institutions and ways of thinking. Otherwise, there is an ever-present threat of anachronism, which may creep in and affect our judgment. The philosophical history of the political aims to unite both ends of the spectrum. By seeking throughout to identify the intersections between the conflicts of men and women and their representations of the world, this philosophical history conceives politics as that terrain where society is at work on itself. The aims and methods, to recall the point once again, are indissociable.
It is not therefore just a matter of doing a simple history of ideas, but rather of understanding the conditions under which the categories that reflect action are both constructed and transformed, to analyze how issues come about, how they impact the social order, tracing a framework of possibilities, delineating systems of opposition and types of available challenge. In fact, political history should not be understood as a more or less linear development, featuring a succession of conquests and defeats leading to an end of history, with democracy celebrated or freedom organized in conclusion. In a sense, there is no possible Hegelian history of the political. This approach is not only called for by what could appear to be a simple requirement of method; it also follows from the very essence of the political, which is defined by the entanglement of the orders of concepts and events, by the effect of the social upon the intellectual, and by the permanence of the need to invent the future by the distinction the old from the new.
The question of the relationship of my approach with the work of Michel Foucault is also worth raising. On this point I wish to be very clear, for the project of the philosophical history of the political recaptures Foucault’s own original intention, as it was manifested clearly, or so it seems to me, both in Madness and Civilization and perhaps even more so in The Order of Things.15 Foucault, as his category of epistēmē illustrates, was also interested in capturing “political rationalities” from a total perspective. But, in my opinion, Foucault remained captive of too simple an understanding of the political. He understood the political in physical or biological terms: opposing forces, processes of action and reaction, and so forth. In this respect, Foucault remained the prisoner of an excessively narrow approach to the phenomena of power. For him, the political amounted to the struggle for emancipation. His premise is the rationality of domination. In his view the analysis of power exhausted, in some sense, the question of the political, which is almost entirely understood in terms of strategic action. Although this aspect of the political is undeniable, it is perhaps not even the most important. The political field is not only organized by clearly determined forces (passions and interests). It is also the territory of experimentation and exploration. In sum, one can say that democracy is not just a solution, whose development is reducible to a confrontation—at times brutal and at times subtle—between progress and reaction (Foucault did a great deal to throw light on the subtle aspect). Democracy is also a problem, felt as such by the social actors. Accordingly, though I share Foucault’s interests, his concern to burst the narrow limits of his discipline, and his hope to be at one and the same time historian, philosopher, and citizen, my work is nevertheless set within the framework of a different understanding of the nature of political experience.
Finally, I can clarify the approach of the philosophical history of the political by reference to the contextual history of ideas as Quentin Skinner famously defines it. Author of the excellent Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Skinner has sought to transcend a specific methodological dilemma, one especially pronounced in the Anglo-Saxon countries.16 The conflict is between a philosophical reading of the major authors, based on a view of texts as something both complete and self-sufficient, and a historical reading, smacking of Marxist undertones, that tended to turn political writings into mere ideological products, born of circumstances and fully determined by them.17 Together with his plan not to restrict himself to the major authors, Skinner, on whom J. L. Austin’s work made a strong impression, sought to read the texts as linguistic acts set in conventionally recognizable fields of meaning.18 Skinner reads texts as discourses whose aim cannot be understood unless their authors’ intentions are contextualized within the set or sets of prevailing conventions.
This is an approach that has led to a major renewal of the history of ideas and has made possible a dialogue between historians and philosophers. But its stimulus to innovation, in my view, has been limited by a failure to see any difference between defending the timelessness of philosophical quandaries and defending their persistence. The terms within which the methodological debate on the history of ideas has been carried out in the United States and in Great Britain led Skinner to damn as philosophia perennis all attempts to establish a relationship between past and present issues.19 (This criticism implies the possibility, I would note in passing, on envisioning modernity as a field with relatively constant features. To bear out the contention, however, would require a discussion of pertinence of the concept of “modernity” in political thought.) The conditions under which Skinner developed his criticism of the traditional history of ideas, then, have prevented him from taking the decisive step toward embracing a philosophical history of the political. But his contribution remains invaluable, and I readily acknowledge my debt to him.
A word in conclusion. The philosophical history of the political has no recipes that can be mechanically applied in order to write a book realizing the aspirations underlying the program—at least, no recipes with better instructions than in a necessarily clumsy declaration of intention of this kind. Every work of scholarship is no more than a fragile attempt to produce, through the act of writing, a dose of intelligibility—in the realm of the political perhaps more so than in any other.