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Books in Review

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.

Reviewed by: Iain Hampsher-Monk, University of Exeter

DOI: 10.1177/0090591714560987

This is a stonker of a book. There are two volumes: Herodotus to Machiavelli


and Hobbes to the Present; four parts: The Classical Conception, The
Christian World, Modernity, and The World after Marx; twenty-seven
chapters and more than a thousand pages. It weighs in at a kilo and a half,
close to three pounds in old money. It is, as the author says, “a long book and
a long time in the making.” Alan Ryan has been teaching political philosophy
in the United Kingdom and United States since my first year as an
undergraduate (indeed, he taught me in my first year as an undergraduate),
and will be known to every reader of this journal. The book presents a life’s
reflections on his subject, displaying, in his trademark clear and accessible
prose, the scholarship and accumulated knowledge of a master. of his subject.
It will be read, with profit and enjoyment by a range of audiences, from peers
to undergraduates and general readers, seeking guidance and commentary
over its long and varied terrain. One cannot overestimate the effort involved
in producing this kind of work and the author deserves the respect as well as
the thanks of the scholarly community for what he has achieved.
Although this is a real attempt—perhaps the first since Plamenatz’s 1 (who
must have taught Ryan)—to construct a truly comprehensive and continuous
historical narrative, it manages to combine that with critical exegesis of the
thought of major figures as well as more synthetic treatments of ages and
issues characterised by the interaction of lesser thinkers. Thus Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes,. Locke, Rousseau,
Hegel, Tocqueville, and Marx each get their own chapters. Classical Rome,
the Medieval World, Humanism, the Reformation, American Founding, the
French Revolution and its critics, etc., comprise chapters in which figure such
second-division players as Polybius, John of Salisbury, Dante, Marsilius,
Bartolus, William of Ockham, Christine de Pizan, Erasmus, More,
Books in Review

Montaigne, Montesquieu Burke, etc. Thinkers are approached directly with


little direct discussion of scholarship. In part four, issues and “isms” prevail,
and there are no chapters devoted to individuals. Its final chapter is based
around a series of global topics which are the subject of current theorizing
rather than theories themselves—fundamentalism, nationalism, nuclear
deterrence, humanitarian intervention, environmental degradation.
With such a huge cast, decisions about inclusion have to be made with
which it would be foolish to cavil; but a few omissions are worth comment.
There was no sustained treatment of Adam Smith or David Hume, major
players in a Scottish Enlightenment, the recovery of which has done so much
to reshape our view of the eighteenth century. There was the merest mention
(in fact two) of Nietzsche, a figure whose influence, however slight in his
lifetime, has been massive in French, and French-influenced Anglophone
political philosophy since at least the middle of the last century. In fact the
treatment of recent political philosophy is distinctly Anglophone: there is no
mention of Habermas, Derrida, or Foucault.
Ryan pays tribute to Berlin and Russell as stylistic models. But the
shadow of these two philosophers falls on the status as well as the manner of
his work. He is, of course, reflective about what he is doing. Political
theorists “have no doubt that they are engaged in productive if sometimes
frustrating, conversations across the centuries with their long-dead
predecessors, as well as their contemporaries.” However true of political
theorists as philosophers, it’s not necessarily true of all historians of political
thought, many of whom see themselves as seeking to understand theorists
without necessarily politically engaging with them. This is not to split
methodological hairs. It goes to the heart of why we study the history of
political philosophy, as well as what we do when we do it. Over the course of
our two careers, the divide between recovering the historical and intellectual
contexts for the better understanding of past political theory and the
construction of histories of it, on the one hand, and the critical analysis and
fruitful contemporary deployment of the ideas figuring in such histories on
the other, has become an issue for our subject, institutionally and politically
as well as intellectually. If you like labels, between what has been a
Cambridge (historical) and an Oxford (pPhilosophical) approach. Although
temperamentally Oxonian Ryan resists this divide, no less than he seems to
resist the distinction between the history of political philosophy (the title of
the book) and the history of political ideas, or just “political theory” (as it is
usually referred to in the text). For him political theory is “a mixture of
philosophical analysis, moral judgement, constitutional speculation, and
practical advice” (I, 117).2
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But what is the History of Political Philosophy? As philosophers who


came to write on the history of political philosophy, neither Berlin nor
Russell wasere disposed to prioritise the interpretive over the critical; and
although Ryan has clearly read into much of the vast literature produced by
the “historical revolution” in political theory, there are echoes of both Berlin
and Russell in the crisp, appraisive summaries that he finds periodically
irresistible (and which make the work so enjoyable). John of Salisbury’s
distinctly low Beta-ish effort was “more sensible, less anarchic, and less grim
an account of politics than Augustine’s; it is also less intellectually interesting
and less morally demanding” (I, 221). Aquinas “was not by the standards of
his day severe or superstitious; he was far from suggesting that Jews might be
killed just because they were Jews or because they inherited the taint of those
who killed Christ. . . . Nonetheless with his acceptance of slavery and the
division of the world into the better-and worse-off, Aquinas demonstrates
how easy it is to reconcile the natural equality and freedom of all mankind
with the inequalities of the world as we have it” (I 253–54). Our author is
shamelessly proleptic: with Marsilius “we are very close to the view of the
nature of a church that John Locke argued for in his Letter concerning
toleration, 350 years later.”
However bracketed, such intrusions, of modern criteria of judgement and
expectations, and of comparison across history between with philosophically
distinct thinkers, can become bewilderingly disconcerting. A reflective
passage on Augustine is an extreme instance, with Machiavelli, Rousseau,
Cicero, Publius, Hobbes, and Locke all jostling for our attention:

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
4 Political Theory

curiously cavalier comments: could anything really have struck Augustine as


“romantic”—nonsensical or otherwise? Do we read Augustine for
plausibility? And once we understand his characterisation of the state as
grounded in its citizen’s “loves” rather than justice—is his view less plausible
than Cicero’s? Were Augustine’s views on non-resistance “at odds with most
writers” (—of his time? Of ours? Ever?) Surely the enormous personal
courage and intellectual effort required and displayed by, for example, John
Locke’s argument to the contrary suggests it was Locke, and not Augustine,
who was “at odds” with the mainstream—indeed, as Ryan later claims, that is
why we study him (940–41).
But the more generic issue here concerns what this kind of trans-historical
comparison may suggest to the ingénu reader. From a pedagogical point of
view, one supposes that these chapters will be encountered chronologically;
and many readers will not have encountered, much less read, the later writers
being invoked to explain or contrast with the earlier subject. What will they
then make of such comparisons? Quite apart from how informative they
might be to them, the cognitive implication they insinuate in the mind of the
acolyte must surely be that “resistance,” “well ordered-ness,” and “natural
equality” are ready-to-hand, transhistorical categories, the deployment of
which can be identified in different times by different thinkers, compared,
and adjudged to be more or less well or badly done. But for the historian this
surely won’t do. For them, such categories of political thought (if indeed they
are categories for the thinker) are invariably encountered already deployed.
For the historian of political philosophy, the interest is not in their likeness or
difference to other appearances, but in the way they are embedded in a
localised—perhaps unique and philosophically grounded—discourse which
can only then be embedded in a wider historical story.
It’s not clear that this tendency doesn’t affect the author. Granted Filmer’s
views are so implausible (to us and Locke) that their purchase needs
explaining. But taking seriously Filmer’s critique of any contractualist
grounding of property rights and government (as Locke was forced to) would
have yielded a more historical account of why Locke’s political and
economic arguments had the shape they did. Although we get a presentist
discussion as to whether a supposedly Lockean-indebted liberalism can
survive the eclipse of its theological, premise, following through in more
detail the implications of Locke’s belief in our obligation to obey natural law
(however problematic its philosophical basis) would surely have helped
explain why he could be so relaxed about our merely tacitly consenting to
governments who adhered to it.
This in turn is implicated in another major issue, which is the shift from
the titular “history of political philosophy” to the “history of political theory”
Books in Review
5

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
6 Political Theory

original and debilitating sinfulness. These are clearly unpromising


propositions from which to construct an ideology of political agency, but we
know that—as a matter of historical fact—from Luther himself to figures like
Cromwell, it permitted the agent to see him(usually)self as an agent of that
providential scheme. This is surely something that requires historical
explanation. Those Protestant polities that produced proto-democracies were
Armininan. Arminianism allowed the [however exiguous] operation of a
freely willed acceptance of saving grace, which was an important condition
for both religious freedom and the possibility for the believer to consider
him-, or even her-self capable of political judgement. Distinctively in
England and the Netherlands, Arminianism, normally a dissenting movement,
became the endorsed creed of a national or dominant church, and with it
came a degree of toleration for (some) other Christian sects, and in England
—curiously for a polity that had united the secular and religious powers in
one—a (relatively) relaxed separation of the religious from the political. This
is certainly political—if not social-democratic—agency. Whether you buy
this particular version of the story or not, 3 the crucial issue is that in such
cases the political story is implicated [in often indirect and counter-intuitive
ways] in a metaphysical, religious, and moral- psychological stories y and
that i’s not recoverable without reference to them.
Another consequence of thus corralling the presentation of a political
thinker within to their more strictly political beliefs is that it is difficult to
avoid giving the impression of a thinker as the holder of a series of political
policies, or views, rather than seeing those views as informed by a coherent
underlying philosophy. Of course, this is not always the case – but you
should always give them a proper run for their money. It is an impression
enhanced here by the practice, referred to above, of appraising such positions,
and comparing them with those of others on similar topics.
Having said that, these judgements are almost invariably witty and astute,
at the very least provoking; and there are some brilliantly formulated
aperçus: that whilst modern Western European states “have their institutional
roots in the European Middle Ages . . . we think about them in ways
borrowed from the Greeks and Romans” (194). Hegel “interprets the cultural
and intellectual history of mankind as the biography of God” (658), or the
aside that “One cannot imagine Edmund Burke reading Hegel with pleasure,
but Hegel’s argument is Burkean” (673).
Only occasionally does Homer nod. Hobbes doesn’t consider the free rider
problem? But surely the free rider is “the Foole [who] hath sayd in his
heart . . . that . . . to keep or not keep covenants was not against Reason, when
it conduced to one’s benefit” (Leviathan 15). I was surprised to read that in
comparison with the English, the French “got toleration right” (646) or that
Books in Review
7

Burke had “no urge to understand [the French Revolution]” (645).


Particularly when the very part of Reflections where that understanding of the
modern fiscal state’s relation to the political economy and sociological forces
of the revolution is most acute is dismissed because the argument is now
“over” and Burke is merely “going on at length about the wickedness of
the . . . expropriation of church property and the incompetence of the
revolutionaries new system of taxation” (626).
Whilst I’ve been critical, there are excellent treatments here—that on
Rousseau, and on the Founding period in the United States, the introduction
and opening sections of the “World after Marx” are particularly fine. The
treatment of the issues involved in the early twentieth century’s welfare state,
communism, and fascism are masterfully deft and insightful and probably
ought to be read by any of today’s theory students unfamiliar with them (as
so many seem to be). I wrote this pretty well as I read;, and as I read, I liked
it more and more. This may be partly because it is so well and engagingly
written, and partly because historicist feathers get less ruffled the closer we
get to the present. This is a book which the author has imbued with his
considerable intellectual character. My differences from the author’s
conception of the enterprise, should not, of course be taken as suggestions
that he has failed to realize his. I learnt many things from reading it;, and
through its sheer persistent intellectual vigour and acuity, no less than its
fundamental decency, it convinces as one way of doing political theory, and
perhaps, even constructing a kind of history of it.

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).

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