Vision and Exemplarity: Political Thinking Between History and Theory

Abstract

This article is concerned with the relationship between political theory, history, and methodology. It cautions against a further ‘methodologization’ of political theory. The article argues against what recently has been called the ‘methodological militancy’ within political theory, which on methodological grounds seeks to keep history and theory strictly apart from each other. Instead, the article argues that political thinking ought to combine untimely resources with timely concerns into a distinct political practice entailing both history, theory and politics. Moreover, the article contends that thinking politically from the outset of historical examples has not only been the modus operandi of most classical political thinkers, but that historical examples are particularly well-suited as raw materials for political thinking. Finally, the article argues that vision and imagination – rather than objectivity and detachment – are the defining intellectual capacities of the political thinker.

Keywords:

• Methodology of political theory
• historical examples
• exemplary thinking
• Sheldon Wolin
• Hannah Arendt

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sheldon Wolin, “History and Theory: Methodism Redivivus,” in Tradition, Interpretation and Science: Political Theory in American Academy, ed. J.S. Nelson (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 43.

2 Benjamin Barber, “The Politics of Political Science: ‘Value-Free’ Theory and the Wolin-Strauss Dust-Up of 1963,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006): 539–45.

3 Leo Strauss, “An Epilogue,” in Essays in the Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique, ed. H.J. Storing (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 327.

4 Barber, “The Politics of Political Science,” 541.

5 For a host of statistical data, see Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 99–131.

6 Christian Rostbøll, “The Non-Instrumental Value of Democracy: The Freedom Argument,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 22, no. 2 (2015): 267–78.

7 Adrian Blau, “How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes,” American Journal of Political Science 65, no. 2 (2021): 359–72.

8 Blau also recognizes this aspect of political theory, insofar as he mentions how learning from the past can offer new answers for problems in contemporary politics, Blau, “How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes,” 365.

9 Nicholas Tampio, “Political Theory and the Untimely,” Political Theory 2 (2016): 1.

10 Tampio, “Political Theory and the Untimely,” 1–2.

11 Blau, “How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes.”

12 William Connolly, Political Science and Ideology (New York, NY: Atherton Press, 1967), 4–8.

13 Arendt in Richard Bernstein, Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996), 133. Italics added.

14 As mentioned in the introduction, good introductions to a host of different methodological approaches within political theory are David Leopold and Marc Stears, eds., Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Adrian Blau, ed., Methods in Analytical Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

15 For an introduction to the methodology of analytical political philosophy, see Christian List and Laura Valentini, “The Methodology of Political Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, ed. H. Cappelen et al. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016); for an introduction to the analysis of ideology, see Micheal Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996); for an introduction to ‘post-modern’ approaches to political thought, see Joshua Foa Dienstag, “Post-Modern Approaches to the History of Political Thought,” in The Oxford Handbook to the History of Political Philosophy, ed. G. Klosko (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).

16 Wolin, “History and Theory: Methodism Redivivus,” 43. In the hope of increasing the methodological awareness of political theorists, Blau has recently argued that “political theorists have no handbook on how to apply the methods we use,” which for him is a shame, as “healthy disciplines see disputes about method,” Methods in Analytical Political Theory, 1, 2.

17 For a critical anthology devoted to Skinner’s methodology, see John Dunn, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); for a discussion on John Rawls’ method of reflexive equilibrium, see for example Daniel Little, “Reflective Equilibrium and Justification,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 22, no. 3 (1984): 373–87; for Habermas’ method of rational reconstruction, see Daniel Gaus, “Rational. Reconstruction as a Method of Political Theory: Between Social Critique and Empirical Political Science,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 20, no. 4 (2013): 553–70; for introduction to the methodology of discourse analysis in the Laclau-Mouffian register, see Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Philips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London, UK: Routledge, 2002), 24–59.

18 Rogers Smith, “Reconnecting Political Theory to Empirical Inquiry, or, A Return to the Cave,” in The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Theory and Inquiry in American Politics, ed. R. Sisson (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 68.

19 Walter Berns, “Voting Studies,” in Essays in the Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique, ed. H.J. Storing (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 55.

20 Wolin, “History and Theory: Methodism Redivivus,” 45.

21 Blau partly disputes this claim by highlighting, as examples, how Plato’s dialectical method, Machiavelli’s scorn of abstract reasoning, Hobbes’ deductive logics, and Bentham and Mill’s critique of intuitionism influence their theoretical arguments and political judgments. Blau, Methods in Analytical Political Theory, 4–5.

22 Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as Vocation,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 4 (1969): 1080.

23 Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 3 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 251.

24 Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London, UK: Routledge, 1994), 126.

25 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1993), 232–33.

26 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7–17.

27 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 247.

28 Ibid.

29 Blau, “How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes,” 365–8.

30 Blau, Methods in Analytical Political Theory, 1.

31 Jeffrey C. Isaac, “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” Political Theory 23, no. 4 (1995): 642.

32 Isaac, “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” 642.

33 Kuhn in ibid.

34 Jeffrey Edward Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense Against Methodological Militancy,” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 425–41.

35 Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense Against Methodological Militancy,” 429.

36 For this argument, see Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense Against Methodological Militancy,” 430.

37 Andrew Vincent, The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85.

38 List and Valentini, “The Methodology of Political Theory,” 525.

39 Quoted in Tom Sorell, “On Saying No to the History of Philosophy” in Analytical Philosophy and History of Philosophy, ed. T. Sorell (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 44.

40 See especially the first chapter of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971).

41 One major school of thought, which this continuum hardly captures is the political thought of Leo Strauss and his followers. Famously, Strauss favored a so-called ‘esoteric reading’ of the classics in the history of political thought, by arguing that the real message of classic political texts was hidden ‘between the lines’ due to the author’s fear of persecution because of their texts’ subversive content, Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952). Strauss thus depicted a fundamental conflict between philosophy and politics, but in contrast to Arendt, Strauss favored the domain of philosophy and its perennial problems over the messiness, situatedness and conflictual nature of politics. See also Mark Bevir, “Esotericism and Modernity: An Encounter with Leo Strauss,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 1 (2007): 201–218. While Strauss indeed thought that there are lessons to be learned from the history of political thought, these lessons are not to be used by political actors as points of orientation in their concrete struggles, but by philosophers in the quest for truth.

42 Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense Against Methodological Militancy,” 434.

43 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

44 For the classic statement, see “Meaning in Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1: Regarding Method, 57–89.

45 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Quentin Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 237–68.

46 Christopher Holman, “Machiavelli’s Constellative Use of History,” Theory and Event 19, no. 2 (2016), online publication, no page numbers available.

47 Niccol Machiavelli, The Discourses (London, UK: Penguin Classics. 2003), 97. Joshua Foa Dienstag also argues that the novelty of the path trodden by Machiavelli is not his so-called realism in politics, but his use of historical examples as a way to guide his understanding of the contemporary situation, see “The Example of History and the History of Examples in Political Theory,” New Literary History 48 (2017): 34–85.

48 Machiavelli, The Discourses, 98.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid, 99.

51 Holman, “Machiavelli’s Constellative Use of History,” no page numbers available.

52 If one has a lot of time on his hands, one should read Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome (London, UK: Richard Bentley, 1864), which is indeed a historical landmark on the subject.

53 Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us (London, UK: Verso, 1999), 9.

54 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History of Life (Cambridge, UK: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 16. Italics in original.

55 Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History of Life, 17.

56 Livy, The History of Rome, 1772, 12 see http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19725/19725-h/19725-h.htm

57 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5.

58 Machiavelli, The Prince, 52.

59 Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, 114–115. Italics added.

60 Hannah Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution,” The Journal of Politics 20, no. (1958): 8.

61 Ibid

62 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 14. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Walter Benjamin (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1968), 50–51.

63 Arendt, “Introduction,” 51.

64 Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of the Narrative,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 167–196, 190.

65 Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, 30–31.

66 Ronald Beiner in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 79.

67 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 85.

68 Foa Dienstag, “The Example of History and the History of Examples in Political Theory,” New Literary History, 488.

69 Ibid, 486.

70 Michael Walzer, “Philosophy and Democracy,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 393.

71 Ibid. Italics in original.

72 Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1987), 23. Italics in original.

73 Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution,” 5. Italics added.

74 Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, 259. Italics in original.

75 Elisabeth Anderson, “Use of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons form a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce,” Hypatia 19, no. 1 (2004): 1–24.

76 Anderson, “Use of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons form a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce,” 11–18.

77 Anderson highlights the difference between a mainstream study on the consequences of divorce, which takes for granted that divorce has negative consequences for women, and a study on divorce conducted by a group of feminist researchers, who because of their values look for different things in the facts, such as divorce as a vehicle for the autonomy and self-determination of women. In this way values make us see facts differently.

78 Sheldon Wolin, 2004, Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 6.

79 Wolin, Politics and Visions, 18.

80 Ibid, 19.

81 Linda Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2015): 163.

82 Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Arendt,” 181.

83 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 238.

84 Ibid, 239.

85 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 263, 285.

86 In ‘Truth and Politics’, Arendt asserts – just after having argued that the political thinker has the right to rearrange the facts according to the story, she wants to tell – that no matter which story the political thinker wants to tell about the responsibility of the outbreak of WWI, she cannot argue that Belgium invaded Germany and not the other way around. There are some historical facts “whose indestructibility has been taken for granted even by the most extreme and sophisticated believers in historicism,” Arendt, Between Past and Future, 239.

87 For a historical and conceptual reconstruction of the revolutionary tradition in post-war political thought, see Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen, Visions of Council Democracy: Castoriadis, Lefort, Arendt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

88 Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Arendt,” 181.