PT 560987
PT 560987
PT 560987
Political Theory
1–7
Book Review © 2014 SAGE Publications
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On Politics, a new history of political philosophy, 2 vols., by Alan Ryan. London: Allen
Lane, 2013.
DOI: 10.1177/0090591714560987
The “well ordered” republic that Machiavelli and Rousseau longed for was an
idealised version of the Republic described by Cicero, and hankered after by
the founders of the American Republic. In Augustine’s discussion, mixed
republics are at no particular advantage . . . any state can be “well ordered” so
long as there is peace, agreements are kept laws are observed, and affairs are
predictable. Rousseau’s claim that when an absolute monarchy achieves these
things, we achieve the silence of the graveyard would have struck Augustine as
romantic nonsense. [His views on non-resistance] are . . . dangerous [and] at
odds with almost everything other writers have said on the subject. Hobbes . . .
Locke . . . Cicero. . . . If Augustine had followed Cicero in arguing that what
defines a true state is that it is based on justice … he would have been more
plausible, but less original and interesting than he was. (I. 180–81)
This feature of the writing is not always this obtrusive, and may be
considered a matter of taste—one which some find engaging. But when he
gets going it leads the author—as it does in the quoted passage—to some
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that we get. The work does not lack attention to historical context: on the
contrary. We get thirty-two pages on the Greeks, twenty-six on the Roman
Republic, eleven on the Empire, and thirty-five or so on the early mmedieval
world. But this is sociopolitical and institutional context, in response to which
thoughts were thought, rather than the intellectual or philosophical
presuppositions in which they were embedded. The latter is surely necessary
to explain their philosophical history. Those who want a story about how an
epistemology or metaphysics can ground political thinking, or how
continuities or discontinuities at this level affect the political story will often
be disappointed—and the work is, after all, subtitled a “a new history of
political philosophy.”
A prime instance of this occurs early on when, after a close reading of the
early books of Republic, we move on, since Plato’s metaphysical convictions
we are told are “not directly relevant here.” But surely they are relevant, both
to an understanding of Plato’s political philosophy and its, and other’s,
histories. One consequence of its omission is that the contrast, when we come
to it, with Aristotle’s naturalism lacks depth. Aristotle’s criticism that Plato
“made the forms exist apart” is surely crucial to the distinction between the
transcendent and the immanent which structures not only the difference
between these two thinkers, but also the footnotes to them that constitute so
much later thought. Another is that there can only be nods to Augustine’s,
and later Christian Platonism. Again, “Luther’s passions” we are told, “were
theological and spiritual; his political ideas were less central, and detachable
both from the events that provoked him to offer them . . . and from his
theological commitments” (327). But to claim that Plato’s or Luther’s
political ideas were detachable both from their philosophy or theology, is
surely, for a historian of political philosophy, a counsel of despair. Ryan
rightly points out that the correlation between Protestant reformers and liberal
democratic politics won’t sustain claims about any “very direct connection
between the religious and political ideas of the reformers” (323). But what
about 'indirect' connections?
Using the strictly political as a criterion of admission to the story risks
excluding ideas or concepts that originated in (what we now call) the fields of
theology, sacred history, metaphysics or philosophical psychology. Whilst
these may only gain political import indirectly—via the self-perceptions of
agents whose belief-systems are shaped by them—the historical narrative
may nevertheless be carried at this, rather than the more explicit level of
political propositions. For example Protestantism does, as Ryan points out,
initially involve an invocation of Augustinianism along with its anti-
institutionalist and quietist turn, the reassertion of predestinarianism, of
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Notes
1. Plamenatz, Man and Society, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1963), was originally
written as a comprehensive and contextualised account, but the context and
minor figures were removed by an over-zealous publisher’s editor. The full text
was recovered by Robert Wokler and published in three volumes (1992).
2. He adds: “it is the extreme cases that sharpen the distinction between statecraft
and philosophy.”
3. For a fuller version, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. I, The
Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).