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.