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Richard Whatmore examines the diverse, interconnected relationships between political history, theory, and action. Considering the work of Michel Foucalt, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and other key theorists, this book highlights the connections between past and present political systems, and the ongoing relevance of the field today.

My Summary

Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities

Questions

I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?

II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?

III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?

AI Summary

Highlights

Chapter 1 History and politics (Page 26)

The print by James Sayers of December 1783 does not applaud the actions of Fox and Burke in promoting decolonization in India as well as in North America. Rather, Sayers accuses both men of seeking to turn themselves into what was called at the time ‘oriental despots’, introducing into Britain foreign tyranny and an addiction to luxury associated with the East. This is why the flag has Fox’s traditional self-depiction of ‘man of the people’ scribbled over and replaced by ‘BAΣIVEVS BAΣIΛEΩN’ or ‘king of kings’. (Page 26)

History explains politics. The history of political thought reveals the variety of perceptions of political projects, actions, and utterances, the hopes of their perpetrators and the fears of their critics. Knowledge of the history of ideologies can be revelatory. (Page 27)

A useful starting point in the history of political thought is to take one of the most inspiring utterances ever made, ‘Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.’ Taken at face value, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s infamous commencement of his Contrat social (1762) was a call to rebellion and acknowledgement of ubiquitous human bondage. (Page 29)

Rousseau’s writings appeared to have a clear message: protest and rebel against the corruption and tyranny you find all around you. (Page 30)

Rousseau, in subsequent writing and in numerous letters to friends asserted that his Contrat social had been entirely misunderstood. His book had asserted that once liberty was lost it could only with difficulty be recovered. Where corruption reigned—for Rousseau this was epitomized by Paris—there could be no possibility of successful reform let alone popular revolution. Rousseau’s broader point was that political argument, especially in democratic fora, was likely to be meaningless because it was so easy to delude the people through rhetoric or their admiration of rich and powerful demagogues. (Page 30)

Rousseau’s case he saw himself to be sending a warning to people living in commercial societies that they were doomed to repeat a cycle of war and rule by tyrannical Caesar figures. Small states were likely to become endangered species. (Page 32)

Revolution, rather than making things better, would always make things worse. (Page 32)

One of the points that will be made here is that if you want to recover the historical meaning of an author’s argument you have to reconstruct the assumptions about politics in the author’s own time. You need to immerse yourself in the writings of the period with the aim of understanding what mattered to political actors, what they perceived themselves to be doing and what their senses were of the range of options open to them. (Page 32)

inconceivable for Rousseau, for example, to imagine a democracy in a large state. He would have said it could not exist because popular free government relies on people sharing a culture and being willing to sacrifice themselves for one another, something only possible where states are small enough for citizens to know and appreciate one another. (Page 32)

Rousseau was falsely accused by critics of being an enemy of the present, an advocate of life as hunter gatherers or noble savages and of wanting, as his enemy Voltaire once put it, to return humanity to walking on all fours. (Page 32)

Contrat social was an unfinished book in consequence (Page 33)

Chapter 2 Definitions and justifications (Page 35)

In the past, where politics has been closely entwined with the worship of deities on whom the survival of a society is held to depend, myths and histories become enmeshed. Using the heralded opinions of the gods to undertake sometimes radical innovation is commonplace in the history of political thought. (Page 35)

Across Europe and Asia belief in the superiority of ancient Rome to contemporary society was prevalent from medieval times to the 18th century. Roman and Greek culture was not only venerated but inspired a rebirth of learning, now termed the Renaissance. Especially marked in the city states of Italy and spreading through the actions of travelling humanists, the Renaissance saw ancient manuscripts copied and transported westwards, saved from destruction within the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Translated into Latin, annotated, and published, these texts had a transformative impact upon life and thought. Classical writing, artefacts, and art conveyed the view to numerous Europeans that their achievements in philosophy, art, literature, and military tactics were inferior to those of the Romans. (Page 36)

On one side of the argument was the French poet Nicolas Boileau, who held that imitation of the ancients was the most apt aspiration for inferiors in the present. On the other, the polymath Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle hailed the superiority of modern refinement and scientific and technological achievements. (Page 36)

If national myths in culture justify combat with other nations or peoples or describe unjustly thwarted destinies in recent or ancient history, these beliefs will be reflected in the history of political thought. If you perceive yourselves to be God’s chosen people in a particular nation or tract of land, history can be used to justify acts of violence for the acquisition of additional territory (Page 37)

A perceived history of decline can lead to the transformation of politics. (Page 38)

It is possible to generalize by arguing that the Confucian four books made canonical during the Southern Song dynasty (1127‒1279) had a message that became a cultural force. They taught self-cultivation and governance through the operation of the networks of individual, family, and state working together. The importance of avoiding conflict and of peaceful resolution of difficulties can be compared with the antagonistic relationships, for example, between feudal lords and kings in Europe, from which can be traced institutions of representative government. (Page 39)

Historians of political thought were critical of ‘presentism’, the reading into the past of contemporary debates on the assumption that the same questions were being studied over and over through history. They equally sought to avoid ‘prolepsis’, the anachronistic reading of historic books as if they were taking a stand on issues that in fact would have made no sense to their authors, such as whether they were democrats, supported human rights, or, these days, would have used Twitter or taken a view on whether Amazon/Google ought to pay more tax. (Page 40)

nothing new about ideologically justified atrocity in European history (Page 41)

1095 to 1453 crusaders (Page 41)

Christians in times of Reformation (Page 41)

Second Anglo-Boer War (Page 41)

First World War (Page 41)

Soviet Russia Gulags (Page 41)

Second World War (Page 41)

Key texts that proved influential in the subject, not least because they were later accused of being infused with anachronistic readings of past ideas, included Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Jacob Talmon’s (Page 41)

The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), H. B. Acton’s The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed (1955), and Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955). (Page 42)

These tendencies have meant that historians of political thought since the 1960s have rejected the view of the past as an ongoing dialogue about the timeless questions of philosophy, the meaning of justice, happiness, courage, wisdom, and virtue. Historians of political thought now reject the notion of canonical figures in political thought. Those whose views before would have been deemed unworthy of recovery are now valued not only for shedding light on ‘classic’ texts but also for contributing to contemporary political discourses that historians want to reconstruct in order to make the past meaningful. (Page 44)

The question that is regularly posed can be framed as follows, with the name of the ‘minor’ figure changing: can Francis Hutcheson—himself considered by contemporaries to be one of the great philosophers of the 18th century—really be included in a list of Philosophers or Great Thinkers? What about Charles Fourier, entirely ignored in his time but, because of positive comments by Marx, now considered to have been a seminal figure in the history of socialism? Does a figure fit into disciplinary histories of philosophy or literature or international relations or political theory? Who should be ‘in’ and who should be ‘out’? (Page 45)

European canon of political ideas is identified and studied, encompassing, for example, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Herder, Hegel, Weber, Meinecke, Isaiah Berlin, Leo Strauss, and Michel Foucault. One regular comment was that there were no adequate textbooks. Several students read George Sabine’s A History of Political Theory (1937), Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (1936), Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), Leo Strauss’s History of Political Philosophy (1963), and, more than any other recently published book, Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978). (Page 49)

It is important to recognize that older approaches to the history of political thought that prevailed immediately after the Second World War are unlikely to be returned to. It was then argued that improving the world—by reading Sismondi or Tocqueville and avoiding Plato, Hegel, or Marx for example—was as simple as providing the books and talking about their content with your friends, students, co-workers, and peers. In the aftermath of many of the worst experiences in human history, such naivety was commonplace. People did not want war. They were not naturally selfish. They wanted to promote the general good of all, across social classes and national borders. Everyone was capable of acting rationally and being swayed by reason. Alternatively, from the perspective of behaviourist social sciences and especially economics, there was no point in reflecting upon the past because human nature was constantly selfish and interest-maximizing. The role of science was to curb behaviour in the cases where selfishness went against the common good. (Page 51)

Chapter 3 The history of political thought and Marxism (Page 53)

The philosophy emerged from a reading of European history, concluding that the ideas behind the history had failed and needed to be changed, in all likelihood by violence. Understanding what Marx and Engels saw themselves to be doing means reconstructing their view of Europe’s failure as a continent with the then most militarily dominant states on earth. (Page 53)

Adam Smith was a hero for Marx because of the systematic nature of his Wealth of Nations (1776), combining conjectural historical analysis with the history of politics, morals, and the economy. Marx was attracted above all, however, by Smith’s revelation of the real mechanisms of British society in his assault upon the empire as a ‘mercantile system’. This was Smith’s term for a politicaleconomic system that emerged from a governing relationship between rich merchants and politicians who passed legislation for their own profit rather than for the good of all. What became Marxism was yet another attempt to remove the possibility of the rule of mercantile systems from earth. Understanding how means returning briefly to Smith’s contemporaries and to what happened during and after the French Revolution. (Page 54)

Like his contemporaries Montesquieu, François Quesnay, David Hume, AnneRobert-Jacques Turgot, and Rousseau, Smith believed the study of societies in every stage of history to be vital in understanding what the future was likely to be and in combating dangers, from repeating the fall of Rome to rekindling religious extremism. All of these men were certain that Europe was different from past societies because of commerce. (Page 54)

Britain was identified by Montesquieu as the freest state in history. He called it, in his influential masterpiece De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748), a republic hiding beneath the form of a monarchy. What Montesquieu meant was that the Georgian monarchs who ruled Britain had powers limited by the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The control by representatives of national finances was a republican notion. Hence Britain was a mixed government, a hybrid of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. (Page 55)

When Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790, critical of events at Paris, he was certain that the revolution was going to fail. Any state, Burke argued, that abolished the institutions on which society depended, the monarchy, aristocracy, and church, was bound to become ever more violent until it collapsed. Burke was widely portrayed as a prophet as the Revolution destabilized. Yet he considered himself to have been wrong. Rather than declining France became ever-more powerful as a state as the 1790s progressed. (Page 55)

Burke was frightened that a new world had been created of fanatic ideological politics in which people would fight to the death for liberty. Liberty appeared to have become more important than life. Burke saw ceaseless turbulence and war ahead as the people turned against their rulers. It is important to recognize that in the final years of his life Burke found a solution to the problem in war to the death against republican France by Britain. In other words, a patriotic and nationalistic ideology had to be generated capable of battling against the republican cosmopolitans who believed they were fighting for the universal rights of all peoples and justice for all mankind. (Page 56)

Paine lived until 1809, increasingly convinced that the terror that had ruined the French Revolution had spread to the United States of America. Paine had dreamed of sister republics living in peace and harmony. By the early 1800s he was advising his friend President Thomas Jefferson to purchase Louisiana from a bankrupt French state. The United States too had to become larger and more powerful, generating commercial revenues to defend itself in war, just like the European forms of state from which the Founding Fathers had differentiated their polity. This meant that in terms of political thought the early 19th century yielded depressing truths about the likely future. (Page 56)

If a combination of nationalism and a mercantile system of corrupt trading companies translated into proficiency at war, the future of politics was bleak. Philosophers from Hume and Kant to Hegel acknowledged that at the end of the 18th century superstition and enthusiasm, terms used to describe dangerous theological fanatics who had thrived in time of Reformation, had translated from religion to politics. Enlightenment policies dedicated to preventing the recurrence of the forms of religious warfare that had shattered Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries were ceasing to function. Three solutions presented themselves to the end of Enlightenment. The first was to create a science of legislation capable of defining the public good through rational laws. The second was to reform liberal polities so that they might combine civil and political liberty with pacific internationalism and free trade. The third was to abolish politics altogether, in the sense of the institutional structures that were held responsible for organizing social life. In the history of political thought, the first two aspirations led to the work of a stream of liberal philosophers through the 19th century, all of whom wanted to create societies immune to mercantile systems, the excesses of empire, and bigoted nationalism. The third response led to Marx and Engels. (Page 57)

Marx claimed to have turned history into a subject as objective as any study of the natural or physical world. (Page 57)

Many historians of political ideas up to the end of the 1980s were Marxists. (Page 58)

Yet the power of Marxist thought is evident in the resemblance between Marxism and doctrines that claim to be most resolutely opposed to it. Modernday neoliberal free marketeers, for example, who have imbibed the ‘laws’ of economics and see no alternative to unfettered capitalism, themselves peddle a version of the Marxist narrative in their refusal to see alternatives, their demand that every problem needs to be seen in global terms, their certainty that what they do is backed by science and that they alone are right. (Page 58)

The dominant social relation of production governed the leading ideas of a society so that the operation of human minds, the realm of ideas, could be read off the material forces in control. (Page 58)

Marx took the further necessary step of turning Hegel’s study of the ideological forces of a society materialist, by revealing the material forces determining each and every ideology. Marx saw himself to have turned a chaotic analysis of ultimately random ideas and ideologies into pure science. (Page 59)

The most intense divisions within Marxism concerned practical revolutionary politics. Revolution might occur through an organized party acting as a proxy or vanguard for the massed ranks of the proletariat, taking control of the institutions of the state and holding onto them by violence if necessary until socialist society could be made real. Taking money from capitalists themselves to support the revolutionary vanguard was even deemed legitimate. This was why Lenin was happy to take funds from the German state to enable his Bolshevik party to organize revolution in Russia, ultimately defeating the more democratic or liberal-minded Mensheviks in overturning the tsarist state after the popular uprising of October 1917. (Page 62)

The sheer intellectual power of Marxist doctrine has to be acknowledged, especially for the generation educated in the 1920s and 1930s, when capitalism appeared to be on its knees. Although the linkage of socialism with tyranny and Caesar-figures was acknowledged from the time of Stalin’s Moscow Trials (1936‒8), the Soviet model nevertheless offered an alternative to the spread of fascist dictatorship across Europe. The sacrifices made by the Russian people during the Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s Germany underlined the sense of contrast. Even when evidence was revealed of the brutalities of the Soviet Union, including mass famine and the slaughter or ostracism of even minor critics of the regime, the fact that in a short period of time Russia had industrialized and strengthened itself to the point of being able to defeat Nazi Germany made it attractive to would-be socialists and reformers. That it was backed up by a philosophy claiming certainty about the future course of history and the inescapable improvement of humanity ensured that it appealed to gullible young idealists. (Page 63)

If the influence of Marxism among historians of political thought is hard to underestimate, the difficulty of refuting such a philosophy also has to be accepted. One danger for historians of political thought was that in rejecting a Marxist framework of understanding they were identifying themselves as antiquarians, uninterested in turning the history of political thought into a force for social change. This can be seen in the work of the influential classicist turned historian of political thought and political theorist Ernest Barker. (Page 64)

In 1938 R. G. Collingwood, having praised Marxists, concluded in his The Principles of Art that Marxism amounted ultimately neither to philosophy nor to history. Marxism needed to be understood as a religion with a creed, set of values, and prescribed system of conduct. This made Marxism as dangerous as the other contemporary political religion, fascism. (Page 65)

The actions of French-educated radical philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who found themselves coming to power by revolution in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, were inspired by a Catholic archbishop who lived in Louis XIV’s France, François Fénelon. It was from Fénelon rather than from Marx that they took the project of abandoning the cities by force and reeducating the people back into agriculture. The example of Fénelon reveals why it became vital to expand the traditional canon of political thought to include religiously inspired political writers. (Page 66)

Marxists in government facing unrest and lacking a precise plan for social transformation generated a singular debt to Fénelon. (Page 66)

Chapter 4 Political philosophers and the history of political thought (Page 69)

Rawls’s Theory of Justice defines principles justified by a hypothetical social contract derived from an original position; members of society find themselves behind a veil of ignorance preventing them from having knowledge of their abilities, class, religion, status, or place in time. Would-be citizens opt for justice as fairness, subscribing to a society in which the principle of equal liberty is enshrined, entailing freedom of thought and assembly, freedom from torture, freedom to vote and to own property. More radically, citizens behind the veil of ignorance secondarily subscribe to what Rawls called the ‘difference principle’, justifying inequalities alone that can be seen to maximize the wellbeing of the least well off in society. Rawls claims that his definition of personhood avoids metaphysics, that he has justified a liberalism inclusive of social welfare without being socialistic, and that his theory is of universal import. (Page 71)

Rawls demands that you judge for yourself the arguments of each of the historic philosophers and work out whether you should be a Kantian, Humean, or Rousseauvian on particular questions. He is equally interested in what they would have said today about contemporary burning issues, were it possible to resurrect and engage with them. Rawls is precise in everything he says and writes. You watch him carefully refine his own argument by testing it against historic interlocutors. He is formulating a new theory of a free society, one which avoids association with a particular conception of the good life to be imposed on others, but rather which rests upon the agreement of sensible and rational individuals to the fundamental principles of a social organization, who together generate what he calls an ‘overlapping consensus’. Through engagement with the great texts, the authors of which seem to have been far more ambitious than Rawls himself in their universal pronouncements, you are encouraged to contribute to the method of ‘reflective equilibrium’, finding a more compelling and nuanced sense of justice as fairness. (Page 73)

When you explain your dream to a historian of political thought she confirms that history plays little part in Rawls’s theories. She says too what you know already, that Rawls’s ahistorical approach to texts is the dominant form of teaching political thought in universities across the world. It is the most straightforward because all you need to get the students to do is to open a book by a philosopher and read particular sections. It can be exciting, because you are using old books directly in the service of present politics. The ‘public reason’ that lies at the basis of such an approach derives from the search for arguments that are convincing and coherent. The view of Montesquieu is rejected, that general principles of liberty or anything else make no sense because what works in one place will not work in another, in part because of the force of history and culture but also because of geographical factors, such as climate, which limit political options available to a society. That Hume, Rousseau, or Kant might have themselves been adherents of Montesquieu is set aside. They are seen to be advocates of universal principles of liberty, which are deemed to exist independently of the advocacy of particular morals or cultures. That is why they are worth listening to. (Page 74)

Arendt’s definition of totalitarianism was expansive. In addition to underlining the novelty of modern governmental terrorizing of the mass of their populations she emphasized the capacity of bureaucracies to justify victimization by reference to racial superiority and by the practice of imperial rule. Solutions were presented by Arendt to the dangers of modern politics in forms of sociability, love, and political activism in her hugely influential The Human Condition (1958). The book indicted western philosophy from Plato to Marx for valuing work rather than political activity. The lack of a public space for politics led to the horrors of a French Revolution dominated by issues of social structure by contrast with the American Revolution that focused instead on liberty. One message was that in modern republics liberty could so easily be lost. (Page 77)

Strauss argued that modern philosophy had declined by defending spurious notions, such as the fact‒value distinction, which gave individuals confidence about the scientific and empirical nature of judgement in contemporary societies where in fact their politics were arbitrary, misconstrued, and frequently deceptive. Analysing past texts and reconstructing alternative histories of the present made this clear, liberating students from the false assumptions about progress, science, and modern superiority. (Page 80)

Strauss reinterpreted figures major and minor in the history of political thought. Moderns had turned away from the wisdom especially of the ancients with regard to the nature of the good life. (Page 81)

There was no single truth to be conveyed about politics (Page 81)

Chapter 5 The ‘Cambridge School’ (Page 83)

The so-called Cambridge School of the History of Political Thought has been the most influential among scholars. It rejected Marxist approaches for propagating bad history. Almost every element of the story of the Cambridge School can be contested, including, as the use of the term ‘so-called’ implies, its title. The reason for the complexity of the story is that the Cambridge School is accepted as being the product of the labours of three scholars with divergent interests and careers, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John Dunn, all of whom formulated their ideas about how the history of political thought should become a field with a method separately and together in the 1960s. (Page 83)

Dunn transformed understanding of Locke by showing that, rather than being a founder of modern liberalism, he was a product of radical Calvinist politics. The religious context of the second half of the 17th century best explained what Locke saw himself to have been doing. (Page 89)

Discontinuity in the history of political ideas was emphasized by Pocock, Skinner, and Dunn. Against Leo Strauss, they did not believe that philosophers throughout history addressed the same questions. There was no such thing as ‘dateless wisdom’. Equally, texts could never be understood if they were treated as stand-alone documents whose meaning could easily be discerned by the act of philosophical reading, whose meaning was forever shifting as the French poststructuralists held, or whose content was determined by the social and economic context of the text’s production. Skinner was especially effective in attacking historians of political thought who attributed to past authors concepts that could never have existed in their world; one such was the prominent founder of the History of Ideas Club, A. O. Lovejoy, who advocated the analysis of ‘unit ideas’ over long periods of time. (Page 90)

Chapter 6 Koselleck and conceptual history (Page 97)

A major influence upon Koselleck was the sometime Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt (1888‒1985), the arch-critic of Weimar parliamentary government as institutionalized division and of liberal-democratic society as mass chaos. Schmitt had defined politics as struggle and the sovereign in a state as the authority defining friends and enemies, vital in times of crisis when exceptional steps might need to be taken by a dictatorial executive to maintain the rule of law. Although Schmitt saw himself to be a critic of both Nazi and communist subverters of law, recognizing that liberalism and democracy had failed and that the state needed to prevent a descent into anarchy, he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and was vocal in both his anti-Semitism and support for Hitler. What Koselleck appreciated, like so many figures subsequently influenced by Schmitt on the left and right of politics, was a focus upon ingrained conflict in modern societies and the difficulty of bringing ideologically opposed parties, themselves akin to fanatic religious groups, to a state of peace. (Page 99)

Chapter 7 Michel Foucault and governmentality (Page 105)

Derrida’s innovative approach to the study of texts he termed ‘arche-writing’, revealed through scrutiny of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages. Derrida claimed an author’s intentions were constrained by the language and logic which he or she relied upon in the expression of his or her ideas; the full meaning, once textual deconstruction was undertaken, could be revealed only once it was accepted that a text might well step beyond the limits upon it imagined by the author. Author and text needed to be distinguished from one another; no interpretation could ever be said to be exhaustive. Study of the intentions of the author was necessary but insufficient to determine meaning. Nor could meaning be derived from class consciousness defined by reference to an author’s biography or to his or her unconscious studied psychoanalytically. Texts were indeterminate. T (Page 105)

Although there was overlap between the way Foucault sought to recover the meaning of texts and that of Derrida, he needs to be set apart from poststructuralist thought, partly because he ploughed a furrow that itself underwent substantial change, but also because his approach to the study of ideas in general, and politics in particular, was very different, establishing a legacy that is probably the most influential today from a global perspective. (Page 106)

One reason for the popularity of Foucault’s ideas was that he uncovered the world behind the veil. Revealing the hidden social order and the actuality of things was a commonplace of Marxist thought, which greatly influenced the young Foucault, who had been a close friend to Louis Althusser. In his later works Foucault abandoned the epistémè, favouring, instead, the Nietzschean idea of genealogy, seeing genealogies composed of warring discourses. (Page 106)

Foucault lauded those, such as Gérard de Nerval, the Marquis de Sade, or Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in seeing behind the curtain, revealed the truth about society and attacked the modern rationality that justified those practices of isolation and incarceration. (Page 107)

Foucault argued that in seeking truth, a constructed concept that in fact did not exist, the purveyors of the human sciences were deluding themselves. What they were doing was determined by the dominant epistémè of the period in question. (Page 107)

Notions of objective knowledge, objectivity in any form, were fundamentally meaningless. There were no real facts. There was no ‘real’ reality. Defences of an autonomous and creative subject called ‘Man’ had to be abandoned because the very idea of a ‘subject’ did not exist. (Page 108)

Foucault argued, to be seen as a genealogy of struggle, of a will to power in Nietzsche’s sense of an irrational motivating force, and with it domination and control. The outcome of any struggle was determined by the capacity of dominant forces in particular societies to repress, control, conceal, and expurgate those marginal to them. In addition to the bare power relations in existence in a society, power relations that shaped not only institutional arrangements but social and individual outlooks, customs, habits, manners, and attitudes, the way people engaged with themselves and the world, it was also necessary to take into account the strategies devised by the powerful to justify their practices and the tactics employed to carry out their actions. Strategies and tactics were naturally deployed by the oppressed too to defend themselves or alter their circumstances. (Page 108)

for Foucault, power relations were everywhere, in every walk of life, in every human interaction. S (Page 108)

Discipline and Punish showed how the classical era was characterized by brutal forms of punishment—torture, beheadings, drawing and quartering—against the transgressors of authority. The modern era, which saw the introduction of the modern prison and the decline in the uses of corporal punishments, was perceived to have been characterized by the rise of compassion and reform, enunciated in congratulatory register by 19th- and 20th-century commentators. Foucault argued that the techniques of control were in fact far greater, demanding docile bodies to be observed, documented, and shaped in accordance with the needs of the dominant knowledge system. He condemned ‘the carceral city’ dedicated to ‘the fabrication of the disciplinary individual’ in which ‘central and centralized humanity’ experienced ‘bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of “incarceration”, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy’. (Page 110)

So pervasive were the forces of governmentality that Foucault argued that even the purported growth of individualism and individuality under 18th-century and 19th-century capitalism was itself in reality part of a broader process of homogenization and regularization. People might think they were rebelling or pursuing practices that went against the cultural grain. Yet they were in fact unwittingly maintaining the existing system of coercive control. Rebellion was acceptable in areas of life that did not substantially matter to governments, especially in terms of threatening the state and the power structures that formed it. (Page 112)

Foucault’s solution to the problem of oppression via governmentality lay in the promotion of ‘new forms of subjectivity through refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries’. Turning to the history of sex and sexuality in his three-volume The History of Sexuality to illustrate what he meant, Foucault’s final works contrasted eastern practices dedicated to sexual experimentation and enjoyment with ever-growing western control over bodies and minds. He had come to the conclusion that even perceived practices of western sexual liberation in contemporary times served to enforce the existing structures of power. Foucault looked to the Graeco-Roman world, in which sex was a means of creating character, and contrasted their sexual practices with modern impulses, which Foucault traced to St Augustine, to use sex to normalize behaviour in societies. (Page 112)

In Foucault’s view there was a contradiction in modern liberalism that needed to be revealed. The institutions of the liberal world in the West, from rights to the welfare state and rules to moderate the boom and bust of economic cycles, were justified ‘to avoid the reduction of freedom that would be entailed by the transition to socialism, fascism, or National Socialism’. Foucault claimed that liberal institutions and practices, ‘the mechanisms for producing freedom, precisely those that are called upon to manufacture this freedom, actually produce destructive effects which prevail over the very freedom they are supposed to produce’. He predicted future ‘crises of liberalism’ not because of capitalism but because of the more encompassing oppressive effects of governmentality of which capitalism was a part. (Page 113)

In the United States, for Foucault, liberalism had justified independence in the 18th-century revolution and then formed the American state. Neoliberalism as it was coming to be known in North America was different from classical liberalism because it called upon the market to measure and evaluate the activity of the state, as if sitting in perpetual judgement. (Page 114)

An example can be found in Keith Tribe’s Foucault-inspired critique of neoliberalism. According to Tribe, the neoliberal charting of a world of economic rationality eradicated the public space formerly occupied by politics, virtue, and ethics. In so doing, a language of politics identifiable since the ancient Greeks was being written over and the monuments of republican argument in the United States, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, were being set to one side. Neoliberalism, from the point of view of Foucault’s definition of governmentality, could be redescribed as ‘unAmerican in the most negative sense possible’. (Page 114)

Chapter 8 Globality, morality, and the future (Page 115)

A significant fact about the field of the history of political thought today is that the disciplinary approaches developed since the 1960s are under assault. One assertion has it that historians of political thought are not critical enough. Progress is said to have occurred in society and what went before reveals abuses and injustice. Written histories ought then to focus upon recent improvements and the superiority of the present, especially regarding human rights. Such an approach can be used to demand further improvement towards an egalitarian utopia. Liberal, neoliberal, and Marxist approaches to the history of political thought owe much to this view of the past, commonplace in studies of politics across certain ahistorical social sciences and among political philosophers. One danger in current trends to moralize history, sometimes by taking what is termed a ‘global’ standpoint, is that the same kinds of utopian and teleological history are replicated just as the exponents of the new histories believe they are doing something different. (Page 118)

Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and such like we get Strauss, Pocock, Skinner, Koselleck, and Foucault. (Page 119)

It is always a bad idea to judge the past by the present as that would mean that we cease to be able to use history or to get any benefit from it. The aim should rather be to allow the past to inform the present. (Page 123)

For most of human history vast numbers of people have lived under what would now be termed an imperial yoke, lacking any sense of sovereignty. Think of the empires that covered so much of the known ancient world such as the Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman. The Umayyad caliphate ranged from the Indus to Iberia. The empire of the Incas stretched across 32 degrees of latitude in 1491, from present-day Ecuador to Chile. In modern times the British Empire, although relatively short-lived, covered a quarter of the terrestrial surface; few of these empires were beset by persistent rebellion. This was not necessarily because humans enjoyed societies where they were perpetually oppressed, powerless, and miserable. Rather, people lived within empires and neither resisted nor emigrated when given the chance because empire was the form of government they associated with peace. If you found yourself living under empire you might find yourself without rights and without liberty. Peace, even (Page 123)

when insecure, might well still have been valued. Visions of perpetual peace in the history of political thought have often come down to the justification of the once-significant category in politics, that of universal monarchy. Universal monarchy meant having one ruler of all lands capable of standing above other political figures and having the strength and authority to bring peace. (Page 124)

What then can the history of political thought do for us? It can relate scepticism and uncertainty about our future to parallel fears expressed in the past. It is not the first time in history that we anticipate the likely end of days through political revolution by democratic mobs or autocrats in the guise of military Caesars or super-rich merchant Caesars. Equally commonplace is fanaticism in politics, ever likely to reignite wars of religion. In commercial societies a threat to stability and peace has always existed in the form of the pursuit of baubles and trinkets, which lead people to turn away from their communities and from politics. As dangerous are evangelical schemes of social or global transformation that can readily be sold to the masses by captains of industry or politicians in demagogic mode. In drawing upon the knowledge of the past generated by scrutinizing ideas about politics in their own time, duties and responsibilities (and those of our governments) to one another and to the wider world can be more clearly and realistically perceived. (Page 126)