I’ve been far too busy to write anything original this past week. However, i thought a few of you might be interested in what turned out as the first half of my last tutorial essay. Comments very welcome on this one. Although anything too devestating will be upsetting, as i haven’t had the tutorial yet:
My objective in this opening section is to sketch a way in which we can think about why the study of political thought and its history is important to us, and hence why it is eminently worth doing. In his Reappraising Political Theory, Terence Ball opens by offering us some vague considerations that might be adduced as to why one should study the history of Political Theory:
“[one can] mutter something about the fascination of classical works for succeeding generations of readers, each of which reads them anew from their own vantage-point. And besides…these authors and their works comprise an important aspect of our Western political tradition, which we renew and enrich by reading, reflecting upon, and criticising these ‘classics’.”
But he goes on immediately to state that “[t]hese answers satisfied neither my colleague nor me”. What I want to try and show is that these considerations, viewed from a certain angle, can in fact give us an awful lot, and that satisfaction may be closer to hand than Ball implies.
To get things under-way, I start with an analogy. I should say now that this analogy becomes rather strained, rather rapidly. Yet interestingly and importantly it retains some of its initial appeal (at least, it’s appeal for me) in spite this. When asking ourselves why we should study the history of political thought, we might think of the question as parallel to one posed to mountaineers. Namely, “Why do you bother to climb the mountain?” To which many mountaineers might think the best answer is simply, “Because it is there”. Indeed, I find there is an initial appeal in answering the question “Why study the history of political thought ?” with a simple “Because it is there”: political thought and its history is a mountain, and that is enough reason to climb it.
Yet other considerations rapidly come crowding in. The analogy between political theory and mountain climbing becomes strained when we think that if political thought is a mountain, then there must be another mountain called Political Practice (and perhaps another one called Political Science) which we are apt to think influences Mount Political Thought, and is sometimes influenced by it. This is an unusual relationship indeed for mountains to exhibit. And whereas mountaineers may climb many mountains, we don’t readily draw a distinction between different types of mountaineers depending on what kinds of mountain they like to climb. But those who spend their lives and careers only climbing the mountain of political thought we tend class together (think of a list that includes Aristotle, Hobbes and Rawls), while those who climb the mountain of Political Practice we tend to class separately (think of Caeser, Cromwell, Roosevelt). Occasionally, some figures make it into both classes – they climb both mountains, and often simultaneously (Lenin is the obvious example, but maybe Rousseau, Proudhon and a young Marx make this list too). It now appears that the analogy with mountaineering isn’t after all a very good one. And what I think this tells us is that we are not going to get away with simply saying that the reason why we should study the history of political thought is just because it is there to be studied. That answer has a certain appeal, but more is going on here, and we have to take into account whatever that something more might turn out to be. As to what I think it it does turn out to be, I now turn.
Let us put the mountain analogy to one side. We can in fact make considerable progress by turning to look at arguments that may be advanced as to why we shouldn’t be interested in the history of political thought, and seeing what is wrong with them. These arguments divide, I think, into two camps. The first says that we should not bother with the study of the history of political thought because it has no relevance to the ‘real world’. The other takes the opposite view, and holds that the history of political thought should be largely ignored precisely because of its impact upon the ‘real world’.
Let us take the latter charge first. In its most common form this might be dubbed the Dead White Men Objection, and runs something like this. The so-called ‘cannon of classic texts’ reflects simply the musings of those who have held social power, influence and respect. Invariably, these have been white males (most of whom are now dead). Their work is both a product and a representation of the historic injustices by which white males have dominated and subjugated others, and continue to do so. Consequently, the study of such works serves only “to preserve and legitimate the power of living white males, and to marginalize the views of women, blacks, gays and other minorities”.
I do not accept this line of argument for two reasons. Firstly, I am dubious as to the claim that reading the ‘great texts’ does serve only to legitimate an illegitimate white male hegemony. In certain instances, the texts themselves seem to directly rule this out: Mill’s On the Subjection of Women directly challenges male hegemony, while his On Liberty would seem to me to rule out racism and arbitrary discrimination. Similarly, it would seem strange to say that Marx advocates any such hegemony; surely the communist Utopia that will follow the inevitable revolution will be one in which men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays will live equally, unhindered by the chains of capitalism? Even authors whose work may itself be discriminatory can yield insights which are antithetical to the author’s original prejudices. For example, while Rousseau most certainly did advocate a male political hegemony, I am with Wolff in thinking that “despite Rousseau’s exclusion of women from the franchise, the real logic of his political thought implies that there is no good reason for this exclusion” As Dunn puts it, “to concentrate on the professional historiography of western political theory, therefore, is in no way to seek to vindicate a preposterous western [meaning Dead White Males] claim to monopolize political understanding, either now, in the future, or at any point in the past”.
Secondly, and I think for present purposes more importantly, to say that we should not study the works of Dead White Males is to miss something vitally important: that our society is, for all its flaws and faults, the product of Dead White Males. Now I for one wish to see a future in which non-white non-male thinking becomes more and more predominant, ideally going hand in hand with a society in which being white or male is itself of decreasing (and ideally no) importance. But the fact is we find ourselves now in a certain society, a society that is ours. We may well want to change that society. Understanding where that society has come from, and why it is the way it is, would seem to me to be a part of that process. But indeed, even if one does not think that a knowledge of where we have come from can have any impact upon where we are going, it seems to me that knowing where we have come from has a value in itself.
Which sets us up neatly for meeting the challenge from the other direction, roughly stated as ‘theory has no impact upon practice, and so theory is a waste of time’. Indeed, the response to this objection is similar to the first. Is it really true that theory has no impact upon practice? It seems not. For sure, Bentham and Mill (say) did not directly and individually implement every aspect of reform in the British Victorian period. But to say that their work had no impact upon social reform at all seems plainly wrong. Hobbes and Locke might never have written policy proposals or sat in government, but to say that their ideas have had no impact on succeeding generations outside of intellectual theorising again seems incorrect. The point is that in most cases it takes time for a thinker’s work to first be distilled and later absorbed into social and political practices. Of course it will be rare (has it ever happened?) for a thinker’s recommendations and suggestions to be implemented, word for word, within a few years of their dissemination. But this is not to say that the works of great thinkers have no impact at all. And of course, sometimes they have an overwhelmingly large and obvious impact. Without Marx, 20th Century history would have been more than a little different.
But again, it would be a mistake to order a refutation solely around the contention that theory impacts upon practice. For sometimes that will appear not to be true. But thankfully, it seems to me that the study of the history of political theory is valuable over and above the question of whether that study can influence the ‘real world’. That is for two reasons; the first is that such study is an intellectual pursuit which is simply valuable in itself. Analogously, advanced mathematics might never yield any practical applications, but surely there is something intrinsically valuable in the advancement of the limits of human intellectual comprehension? The same seems true with the study of political thought and its history. Secondly and connectedly, (and to make the same point as before), this is our intellectual history, our intellectual pursuit. The intrinsic value of intellectual investigation into the history of political ideas is made more pressing by this simple fact. Of course, there will always be those who simply do not care about this. But that is fine. The fact that I, and many like me, do care is itself enough proof that this pursuit is an important, and for some human beings, fundamentally human one.
I think it can now be seen that what we have been looking for – something supplementing the ‘Because it’s there’ answer – has been close to hand all along. We have considered (roughly) three challenges, that of Dead White Men, that the study of theory has no impact upon practice, and that such study has no intrinsic value. Yet considering these challenges has revealed a tradition which is profoundly ours. Put another way, this is our mountain, and we climb it. And perhaps there is not much more to say than that: but what we can now see is that saying this is actually saying quite a lot. Perhaps Ball need not have been so dissatisfied with his mutterings after all?
Badgers Monday, Oct 22 2007
Sagar's Social Commentaries Paul Sagar 10:20 pm
The Government has been advised to cull them, in order to stop cows getting TB.
This is expensive, and according to some research probably won’t work anyway, because the badgers will flee to other farms.
I was wondering, could the Government not instigate a system of badger vaccination? I mean, badgers are a protected species, so groups like the RSPCA have a pretty good idea where a lot of them are. Is a nation-wide Badger BCG drive just me being really silly?
EDIT: Hmm, perhaps there is no badger TB vaccination. Otherwise they’d vaccinate the cows I guess. Still…
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