The Foundations of Modern Political Thought

Wiki tells me¹ that The Foundations of Modern Political Thought is a two-volume work of intellectual history by Quentin Skinner, published in 1978. The work traces the conceptual origins of modern politics by investigating the history of political thought in the West at the turn of the medieval and early modern periods, from the 13th to the 16th centuries. It represents the contextualist approach to the history of ideas which Skinner and his colleagues in the Cambridge School had pioneered in the 1960s. The Times Literary Supplement named the Foundations one of the 100 most influential books since World War II. And all that seems fair enough, even if I'm not really sure quite what the "contextualist" stuff is about.

This review is going to be a bit crap, because I finished volume one before the start of last summer, and volume two before winter, but them wimped out of reviewing it, and now of course my goldfish brain has largely forgotten about it. But perhaps the things that survive this late will be the valuable bits.

So, in no particular order:

In volume one, in particular, we get a lot of political commentators, book writers, whatever, commentating on politics and the form of their writing is advice to Princes on their governance, in the manner perhaps of Machiavilli - I'll come back to him in a moment - but from different perspectives. What the book never ever discusses is whether the Princes were listening. It is perhaps possible to argue that, at least in the long term, reverse causation is just as valuable: we know what Princes were thinking about, because it is the kind of thing that commentators were writing about, and they wrote about it because they knew the Princes were interested. But nonetheless it seems a lacuna to me.

There's a lot of useful context here that I'm glad I now know or rather, given my appalling memory, glad that I'm vaguely aware of. Hobbes for example does not come out of nowhere as I'd previously assumed by default; he is part of, perhaps really the culmination of, a tradition of attempts to axiomatise human relations. This paragraph would have been much better written closer to my reading.

It is amazing - to me, an atheist in good standing - how badly these clowns allowed religion to cloud their approach to politics for so long. So many people just couldn't help giving advice along the lines of "oh course you must first be godly: tell the truth, rule justly in all things" and so on. Telling the truth - in important matters - is undoubtledly a part of any moral code (even an atheist one, so in a sense my complaint about religions isn't quite on the ball), but that doesn't make it always a good idea in politics. What these people utterly lack is the concept of iterated prisonners dilemmas, strangely enough, or game theory in general. And indeed I think QS somewhat lacks it too, or perhaps he is just describing what was there rather than judging it. Anyway, a few commentators - like Machiavelli, but he was merely one of a type, we just happened to have picked him as the one to remember because we all have memories like goldfish and cannot cope with complexity and need personalities - did have the intelligence and independence to suggest that actual effective governance, perhaps even for the good of the people², might require being sneaky sometimes.

Part of the religious problem was a quite explicit passage in Paul, Romans 13: Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but also for conscience’ sake. I'm sure I could dance this around if I needed to: Paul was writing for the times when Christianity was weak, and he was advising his people to lay low, obey, while they were powerless. It didn't occur to him to worry about being in power. But, by the time we're talking about, nominally Christian rulers were in power, and naturally the church had taken the obvious tradeoff: prop up the civil authorities, in exchange to priviledges. So this passage was very well known, unlike the minor parts of Leviticus that tell you not to eat weasels. This then gets you into vast trouble when you have a Holy Roman Emperor - or whatever - nominally ruling over a pile of kingdoms, and your local authorities are obviously despots. Are you allowed to revolt? People then wander around making up "lesser magistrate" rules, and trying to argue that if a local worthy³ offers you a chance to revolt, you can take it. By the time we get to the reformation, the kind of tyranny people are revolting against is more the "I don't like your religion" type than the "please stop torturing me" type, which is unfortunate as it shows you how people will twist words.

Back to volume one, mostly about the Northern Italian city-states, who realised they had problems similar to those of much earlier Greek city-states, and so were interested in the newly-emergent works of Aristotle and so on. They worried about using mercenaries - very convenient, but who might well not bother fight and die when it came down to it - versus arming their own peasantry, but who knows what peasants might do once they had arms and the thought of using them. Volume two shifts North to France and the Reformation, where the issue becomes convincing enough people that your religion is popular enough that suppressing it would be difficult. And so we return to the political pamphlets desperately searching for some way around Romans 13; eventually, if I recall correctly, they start groping towards what Hobbes states explicitly: there can be only one authority; and religious power must be subsiduary to civil. I don't think toleration becomes widely popular though; in all of this, these people remain foreigners⁴, their religion desperately important to them, and so insecure that they cannot help trying to impose it on others. But now I'm imposing my ideas on top of them, so I'll stop.

Notes

1. And you. But I don't care about you :-)

2. To be fair the perspective is always the good of the rulers, or of governance in general. But perhaps those converge, in that even simply stable governance without warfare, sieges and rapine would be an improvement.

3. Obviously, only a worthy; the common folk are not allowed to decide that kind of thing for themselves under any circumstances, just think where that might lead to.

4. See The Go-Between.

Refs

* The Climate Science reference they don’t want Judges to read.

* UK and Renewables - SoD

Art for art's sake / money for God's sake

Art for Art's Sake is a song by 10cc, but I prefer the He's Dead Jim version; the original is thin. Although the song is really only one phrase, it's a good phrase.

My excuse for using this is a thought to go with my "William does art" series: The Hunt in the Forest and friends or Lord Ribblesdale and friends: which is that perhaps the old stuff is better because it isn't just done for art's sake. I'm not sure whether that really holds up though.

And to spin out this thin post, I offer you Eliot's Portrait of a Lady. Wiki will tell you what it is about, but perhaps doesn't quite catch it. You know you're in class poetry when it uses words like "velleities" which I had to look up; beautiful; and so fitting to the spirit of the work.

I

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon

You have the scene arrange itself — as it will seem to do—

With 'I have saved this afternoon for you';

And four wax candles in the darkened room,

Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,

An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb

Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole

Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.

'So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul

Should be resurrected only among friends

Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom

That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.'

—And so the conversation slips

Among velleities and carefully caught regrets

Through attenuated tones of violins

Mingled with remote cornets

And begins.

'You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,

And how, how rare and strange it is, to find

In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,

(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind!

How keen you are!)

To find a friend who has these qualities,

Who has, and gives

Those qualities upon which friendship lives.

How much it means that I say this to you —

Without these friendships — life, what cauchemar!'

Among the winding of the violins

And the ariettes

Of cracked cornets

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins

Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,

Capricious monotone

That is at least one definite 'false note.'

— Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,

Admire the monuments,

Discuss the late events,

Correct our watches by the public clocks.

Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

II

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands';

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

'You let it flow from you, you let it flow,

And youth is cruel, and has no remorse

And smiles at situations which it cannot see.'

I smile, of course,

And go on drinking tea.

'Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

To be wonderful and youthful, after all.'

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune

Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:

'I am always sure that you understand

My feelings, always sure that you feel,

Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel.

You will go on, and when you have prevailed

You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

But what have I, but what have I, my friend,

To give you, what can you receive from me?

Only the friendship and the sympathy

Of one about to reach her journey's end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends ....'

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends

For what she has said to me?

You will see me any morning in the park

Reading the comics and the sporting page.

Particularly I remark.

An English countess goes upon the stage.

A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,

Another bank defaulter has confessed.

I keep my countenance,

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired

Reiterates some worn-out common song

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things that other people have desired.

Are these ideas right or wrong?

III

The October night comes down; returning as before

Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease

I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door

And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

'And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?

But that's a useless question.

You hardly know when you are coming back,

You will find so much to learn.'

My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.

'Perhaps you can write to me.'

My self-possession flares up for a second;

This is as I had reckoned.

'I have been wondering frequently of late

(But our beginnings never know our ends!)

Why we have not developed into friends.'

I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark

Suddenly, his expression in a glass.

My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

'For everybody said so, all our friends,

They all were sure our feelings would relate

So closely! I myself can hardly understand.

We must leave it now to fate.

You will write, at any rate.

Perhaps it is not too late.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.'

And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression ... dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance —

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;

Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand

With the smoke coming down above the housetops;

Doubtful, for a while

Not knowing what to feel or if I understand

Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon ...

Would she not have the advantage, after all?

This music is successful with a 'dying fall'

Now that we talk of dying —

And should I have the right to smile?

Yes I know I missed out the epigraph.

An Irish airman foresees his death

A rare post about climate; I do apologise. But first:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

Not, you'll be unsurprised to learn, what I actually wanted to talk about. But there is some vague relation. Full version here, if you need a reminder.

What I actually wanted to comment on was "A climate scientist reflects on 30 years fighting the ‘forces of unreason’" by Benjamin Santer. As far as I know Santer is one of the good guys, so I'm only going to quibble.

Quibble one is Participating in an IPCC assessment is an unpaid, multi-year commitment by individuals with precious and finite stores of time and energy. This isn't really true, in my admittedly limited and out of date experience. Participation is, formally, unpaid, at least by the IPCC: but actually you get to do it on your employer's time, so it isn't really pro bono. I guess he is trying to push back against the idea that he's getting consultancy rates for it, but I think claiming pro bono is iffy. It's also close to trivia, so I think he should just not have mentioned it.

Continuing, we have In 1990, we concluded that “The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more.” Put differently, the jury was out on human culpability for climate change. In 1990, it was still too early to tell whether burning fossil fuels had significantly altered Earth’s climate. And this is correct - so much for the fuckwits who claim we knew it all in the 70s, or 80s, or whatever.

Quibble two is But a mere five years later, in the IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report, the scientific jury reached a very different verdict... “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”... A human-caused climate change signal had been identified. We could see the signal. It was there in data. Humans were no longer innocent bystanders in Earth’s climate system. As I pointed out convincingly in Who Knew What When, "balance of evidence" is weak, as is "suggests" and "discernable influence". Notice how '90 talked about not-unequivocal, and '95 has definitely not got to unequivocal. Per WKWW, the actual shift - in terms of what was written down - was more gradual.

Santer then continues talking about "forces of unreason". He restricts his discussion to physical climatology, so he can find himself on the side of reason without any difficulty. Had he attempted to discuss economics, he would find his allies guilty of unreason; he knows that, so carefully avoids any such discussion.

Reflections on recent events in South America

We start with a nice little cartoon. Perhaps a good reminder that the left can poke fun at itself, or can't resist doing so.

Anyway: da MM has captured Evil Dictator Maduro, an action generally considered illegal "under international law". This Volokh article by Ilya Somin is a good expostion of the finer points (see also On the Legality of the Venezuela Invasion). However international law is but a weak reed; see this article for that attitude forcefully pursued. Technically, it is probably illegal under US law too, since the US has ratified the UN charter; but unless Congress becomes less supine that is unlikely to matter¹.

Hobbes taught us long ago that Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength; and although many people don't like listening to Hobbes, US foreign policy has.

An argument, much repeated, is that upholding international law is a good thing in itself, because upholding civilised norms is good. There is much to this argument, but what it put into my mind was the thought that a thing that one upholds, voluntarily, for the greater good is more like morality than law. So international law has the forms of law - lots of bits of paper studiously written by serious folk - but not the reality: enforcement. Like Rawl's Justice as Fairness it attempts to mislead you with words; it should drop the word "law".

I think that all sound-thinking folk would agree that within a civilised society, we want Rule of Law and not Rule of Individuals governing relations. Both for theoretical reasons, and for reasons of experience: we see from examples that individuals cannot be trusted with so much power. But the slipperly slope is to extend that to international relations between states, analogising people and countries. There are only, what, 200 countries in the world? Many of which are tiny or of no importance in international relations. So perhaps there are 50 that matter. It isn't quite so clear that in a community of 50 people, we would want exclusive rule of law; we would probably have rule-of-norms, with only informal enforcement. And if some nerd started torturing his cat, he'd get slapped around by the Big Guy.

Having considered this in the abstract, what about this concrete example. Is it good or bad? Trump Finds the Golden Mean in Venezuela finds RH thinking it good. I kinda agree². Removing an Evil Dictator gives the Venezuelans a chance to do better. Promoting the vice-prez, rather than pushing for the winner of the elections, was a bit of a surprise, but might actually make sense in the long term, in minimising disruption. You may also like Regime Change in Venezuela Is a Good Calculated Risk. Doubtless you can find for yourself any number of people saying it is terrible. Time will tell. Arguing that breaking international law is a really bad idea because then the Ivans might invade Ukraine is fuckwitted, obvs; ditto the Chinks and Taiwan. Arguing that removing Maduro is a good idea because it might scare others into behaving better is not implausible.

As an example of performative nonsense that isn't even self-aware I find stoptrump.org.uk/sign-venezuela-letter, which offers the delightful "The UK must support international law, in actions not just words, and vote to condemn Trump’s US". However votes are but words, not actions. The chance of the UK taking actual meaningful action is fortunately negligible.

While I'm on this stuff, I found US seizes Russian-flagged tanker in Atlantic instructive. In that it appears to display near-incompetence on the part of the USAnians. How can the most powerful navy in the world manage to lose a slow unarmed tanker and let it get across the Atlantic before finally seizing it?

And on a slight tangent, consider The Crime Victim's Right to Justice. The UK has some similar stuff about "victims rights". But notice that it is very much a recent add-on; it is in no way fundamental to the justice system. This is because (as I've said elsewhere but sadly cannot now find³; though I dislike rights-based language is close) you don't actually have a "right" to not-be-beaten-up; it is the other way around: the govt promises to punish anyone who might beat you up.

Another: this X post is an interesting example of how just going tut-tut isn't going to preserve your norms.

Notes

1. The Graun and others are excited that Senate advances war powers resolution to stop Trump from taking further military action in Venezuela. But it would need to get through the House, and then not get vetoed by - arf, arf - da MM; so that doesn't look promising.

2. What pathetic weaselly words. I mean I agree with all or most of the individual sentences. I'm still reluctant to agree with the overall conclusion.

3. Found it: Might is Right.

Refs

* The Unbearable Stupidity of Nick Shirley (RH on Somali / Minnesota, not what you might guess)

* Does the Supreme Court Favor the Rich?

* Reflections on recent events in the Middle East.

* Microloans Became Microdeposits.

* Against Recent Events.

* What Kind of Immunity for ICE Agents?

* Venezuelans believe Donald Trump has offered them a better future - the Economist (source for my image above).

* Buckley v. Valeo is Not What Ails American Democracy; see-also this from EV.

* 2026/02: Venezuela frees high-profile opposition figure Juan Pablo Guanipa.

The Book of the Old Year

Or, the Year in Stoats, 2025. Having at last driven away almost all my commentators - sorry about that, and thanks for all that did comment interestingly, but so it goes - I can once again choose a post per month by whatever means I see fit. Happy New Year to all.

* Dec: The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen.

* Nov: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

* Oct: Prospects for Peace.

* Sept: The Hunt in the Forest and friends.

* Aug: A meta review of the no-longer-new DOE report.

* July: Book review: An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy.

* June: Might is Right.

* May: How do we solve moral problems?

* April: Lord Ribblesdale and friends.

* March: Conjectures and Refutations.

* Feb: Return to Sneachda.

* Jan: In a democracy, when and where should majorities rule?

Refs

* 2024, 2023; 2022; 2021; 2020.

* Also available on Substack.