Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (editors), History in the Humanities and Social Sciences

The Politics of the Past, Amid and Beyond the Academy

The Issues

The collection of essays found in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, is a well-crafted, serious, and important set of contributions by sixteen academics to our knowledge of how history is valued in: law and legal history; historical sociology and social theory; political philosophy and political science; philosophy and its history; feminism; literary studies; economics; and anthropology. The essays aim to illuminate what the editors call “historical consciousness” (pp. ix, 1), thereby offering second-order reflections on a first-order phenomenon. Given our world’s insistence on economic and technological progress that dehistoricizes as it digitizes the human intellect and experience, the book’s various commentaries on historicity are timely.

The volume arose from a conference and workshops of academics from English and American universities convened at the University of Cambridge in 2019. The editors organized these events and have sifted the results. There is no party line but many pieces reflect the imprint of the Cambridge School of historical interpretation. The editors’ independent eminence brings intellectual authority to the enterprise, while the book’s articles and issues are significant.

How are we to understand the “history” that is at stake here? For R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), an intellectual anchor for the editors, history is not a mere chronological compendium of facts, legible from their worldly appearance and suitably interpreted by recognized authorities. It surely emanates from minds in the present, but for Collingwood and the editors, it seriously tries to account for what happened in the past in terms of the questions, problems, and circumstances that gave rise to its enactment. Reading history simply from our standpoints produces counterfeit coins that serve fraudulently to credit current arguments.1 Actions, deeds, and events have correlates (not causes or partners) in their intentions and rationales — whether or not the latter are entirely truthful (as they rarely are). Historians naturally appreciate the value of their work, but wherein lies its significance for those who don’t wear that badge of honor — whether they work in the academy or live outside it?

This question opens a Pandora’s box of issues that require interpretations of individuals, institutions, texts, and cultures about their relationships to our past — as well as political questions about this interpretive project and the book’s concerns. For the challenge of making sense of history not only involves its epistemic features and the methods needed to acquire historical knowledge; it reflects our very understanding of social scientific, literary, and philosophical inquiry — by implication the intellectual relationship of philosophy to history and the associated political relationship of words to deeds. How are we to account for these relationships, on their own and in terms of each other, especially since the contexts for them reflect at some level a common world, political conflict, and a desire for cooperation in collectively shaping power? The intellectual relationship occurs by way of the status and actions of human agents in formal or informal political life (whether mostly civic, state-centered, imperial, or transnational). But it’s also worth noting how academia composes this relationship. Note the current organization and division of academic disciplines in England and the USA. College and university departments don’t provide well-furnished homes for studying politics as a constituent of thought and action, e.g., historically informed political theory or political philosophy. Departments of history, political “science,” or philosophy regard them as insufficiently contextual, statistical, or general, while administrators eye them with apprehension.

The Contributions

Before elaborating my interest in the relationship of political to historical concerns in the humanities and social sciences, the book’s valuable essays deserve to be heard. The editors do not divide and categorize them, but they neatly summarize each in the Introduction. The authors have posts in English (12) or American (4) universities.2 For the purposes of this essay, their articles fall into three categories and pursue three complementary themes. The first includes five that focus on the harm done in the humanities or social sciences by ignoring or misusing history — evidenced in bad arguments, incomplete appreciation of historical reality, or manifestations of jaundiced ideology. The authors in this category point out how luminaries in law, international relations, philosophy and its history, and literary interpretation convert the past to a series of data points that lack temporal, spatial, geographical, racial, and gendered markers that, as a result, mask inequalities in status and power.

With regard to international law (IL), Michael Lobban notes that history is often understood as an “external” source of evidence to sustain modern “doctrines” whose core is understood to be “internal” to the law. Lobban points out the limits of this perspective as an account of historical and legal realities. To be sure, legal work needs to reconcile “the law” with “the facts’ in order to regulate political flack. And from Aristotle to Kant, “law” has signified the legitimate rule of practical reason. But the relationship of IL to history and politics always will be fuzzy: all legal doctrines are matters of convention, and IL’s international champions have minimal, enforceable power. As such, it is mostly a rhetorical tool and presentist by design. The political ambiguity of international law is most evident in the adjudication of internationally sanctioned human rights. Lobban’s coherent arguments about the discipline of international law could do more to recognize how frameworks for viewing legal history are dependent on a large-scale (and shaky) political consensus at the national and international levels — one in which most major powers only fitfully partake.

The interpretive guideposts in international relations or international politics (IR) partly derive from their lodgings in departments of political science and launchings (mostly) in the wake of World War I — and only enthusiastically in the USA after World War II. (Ironically but not surprisingly, the initial major lessons learned from World War II in the academies of the victors was not to learn from history.) The principal guides in post-war IR have been realism and liberal nationalism (with the latter signifying, roughly, the afterglows of NATO, the World Bank, and the UDHR). Drawing on the work of W. E. B. DuBois, Jennifer Pitts points out that neither of these perspectives adequately accounts for the global effects of race, empire, and the domination of the global north over the global south. Mira Siegelberg finds fault in conventional IR perspectives because they tend to regard as secondary political concerns that are primary — such as the interrelated factors in international politics today, e.g., climate change, feckless states, and the major new flows of refugees. Partly because of its closeness to national policy-makers and aversion to careful historical study, IR is ill-equipped to understand and usefully address these political problems.

Also in the first category are two articles about the history of mostly anglophone philosophy. They consider how rational inquiry can avoid being a tool of power relations. These pieces highlight the problems of differentiating history from philosophy and the troubles that appear when history and philosophy are linked. Susan James notes that in recent times many philosophers understand history according to what she calls a Separation Thesis. It regards philosophy as “autonomous,” the work of a chronological line of philosophers, with each assessing what the last has left behind — e.g., Aristotle distancing himself from Plato and Athens; Kant triangulating himself via Leibniz and Hume in the German enlightenment; the short twentieth century correcting the long nineteenth, and so on. In this picture, philosophers regard history in ways that resemble the attitude of many social scientists: it’s grist to their mill. As a result, the history of philosophy can be evaluated by philosophy proper as it ponders the universal and the eternal. Philosophers need to know their history about as much as natural scientists need to know theirs — mostly by what the last few years have to offer. Even if historians of philosophy endow their own work with intellectual dignity and note the conditions in which previous philosophers worked, James notes that their work is not regarded as relevant to professional conversations with proper philosophers. For the generalizing work of the latter, guided by logic and intuition, should not be sullied by traces of philosophical experience from the past. If one accords more philosophical honor to history, however, as James implicitly recommends, it may become difficult to acknowledge philosophy’s distinctive identity.

What then happens when philosophy — and philosophers — cease practicing their work as autonomous inquiry? Does it mostly become a pristine form of social theory? Hannah Dawson’s essay raises this question as she assesses the result of making gender an irreducible part of philosophical inquiry. Referencing Poulain de la Barre and Wollstonecraft, she reminds or instructs us that many of the feminist critiques of philosophical reason originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, precisely when individual and human rights belonged to political critique. Either deliberately or not, philosophers of these eras degraded the mental or physical capacities of women. But one doesn’t need philosophy to mount this critique; today, it is publicly commonplace (if not commonly observed). So how does Dawson’s exposures of miscast philosophies in history contribute to philosophy? Philosophical reason, it would seem, needs to avoid these marks of Cain in human history, other modes of unjust domination, or the “structural oppression” that results from “othering” (understood to be more than noting that others are not me but still very much like me)? So then how can philosophy contribute to human understanding? How and where do we make these new kinds of assessment in a philosophical voice? Dawson wants to enlist “philosophy” for the emancipation of women from their historical subordinations, and she surely participates in that good work, but if the duress experienced by women manifests itself in “structural oppression” and that emanated significantly not only from the agents we now know as the sex and gender of men, maybe men are not the sole causes of the problems women experience as women. And if they are, then many who are men can’t be part of the solution to their problems. One may also wonder about what “philosophy” has to say about “justice” and its absence. If rational progress in these fields can’t be observed, that may put philosophy behind the eight-ball.

The second category of contributions are engaged not so much in critique as constructive accommodations of differences. Writing about their disciplines or lines of research, they propose new kinds of complementarity between critical, propositional reason and history. Stathis N. Kalyvas and Daniel Fedorowycz seek to bridge the gap between “nomothetic knowledge” and explanatory schemes in the social sciences — drawing in particular on both social scientific data and history. Samuel Moyn salvages the history of social theory for sociology. Ira Katznelson argues for the integration of “analytical history” with “political science,” while Sheilagh Ogilvie brings together economic modelling and historical understanding. Cathy Shrank highlights an interface between literary interpretation and historical understanding, while Adam Tooze canvasses Paul Krugman’s combination of neo-classical economics and political analysis. Finally, Joel Isaac revisits the history of anthropological theory as a tool for interpreting the nation-state. Here, the happy mediums tend to be unique to the authors and not methodologically programmatic. Thus, with Kalyvas and Fedorowycz, one may acknowledge that statistical conclusions which pertain to social understanding produce sorts of facts. Think of the new data generated by COVID-19. But that’s only the beginning; then historical and political judgment must come into play, and they are tutored by the research. Or, one might sympathize with Moyn’s ends but wonder about his chosen means. How does one understand “social theory” as a subject that carries intellectual authority when its authors and agents are so diverse? Ogilvie’s aspirations are ecumenical, but isn’t the whole point of modelling to shave away the particularities of history? With Katznelson, one might enjoy bringing history back into political science, but doesn’t “analytical history” beg the question of what counts as historically valuable? One may look admirably at the spectacle of Paul Krugman wearing the two hats of economist and political pundit, but isn’t he virtually one of kind? Anthropologists are well-advised to attend to Isaac’s advice and revisit the work of their field’s founders. But doing so as part of more than an archeological endeavor remains challenging since sites for traditional anthropological ethnography have almost disappeared. Perhaps the most successful attempt at merging the work of two disciplines appears in Shrank’s argument that that there are more and better understandings of literature than what New Criticism or the New Historicism provides. She recalls the sixteenth-century literary genre of prosopoieia, which entailed the meaning of literature as poetry and poetry as a public art that reflected rhetorical tropes of the time. She points out that reading sixteenth-century texts that functioned as assets to education in “public duty” makes for good literary appreciation and good history. She notes that reading them as both good reads and historical acts enables us to attend to the distinctly emotional and creative elements that belonged (and belong) to reading literature while appreciating their historical inflections and political potential.

All of the authors in this category are innovators, and they imagine novel disciplinary partnerships. But it’s unclear how their attempts at disciplinary reconciliation would attract followers. Academics rarely have the same aims in view, even as their work may be fertilized by work produced by individuals of different departments. To be sure, the reductions in departmental support from administrators now encourage the bureaucratic category of academic work called “inter-disciplinarity,” but even as this confused notion has been around for a while in colleges and universities, it does not have many homes in graduate education. More time will lapse before inter-disciplinarity as such yields intellectual fruit. The fortuitous coincidence of time, place, and personalities that made possible the Cambridge School is rare, indeed, and none of its teachers or students (who never self-identified as part of an intellectual club) would want its character to ossify.

In reflecting the third theme, four writers demonstrate how history can be used properly and constructively in various forms of intellectual inquiry. Hazem Kandil offers disciplinary criticism of sociological arguments about the present or past concerning “power” that locate their truths in narratives of causation. Sociologists, he notes, have felt little need to think about what happened before the nineteenth century (some pay homage to Montesquieu). Their foundation rests with theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, often (dubiously) transposed into generic, testable accounts of class, culture, and institutional power. (Sometimes Tocqueville is included, but his assorted talents as an ethnographer, historian, theorist, and politician make his genre of writing harder to classify). This enables non-positivist sociologists to ask more general questions about the past and the present than is the wont of either their statistically minded brethren or more contextually rooted historians. But this relatively historical and theoretical armature, Kandil argues, tends to avoid studies of historical processes whose substance only can be seen amid temporal sequences that don’t observe the laws of direct causality. These phenomena — such as war, as rendered by Clausewitz — display the interactions of human agents and social mechanisms that elude sociological theory’s conventional interpretive frame. For Kandil, historical sociologists need to account for these phenomena, too, and to do so bringing imaginary tape recorders (my metaphor) into their studies of the past, in order to explain sociologically how history is made via what he calls “bottom-up” rather than “top-down…narratives of power.” Need it be said, the subsequent task of relating the bottoms to the tops is the stuff of politics. Pamela Clemit’s concerns are less overtly theoretical. By focusing on the material changes in the identity of an author’s works — in her case, William Godwin’s — she shows how intellectual history and the history of political thought benefit from knowing how texts are edited before they are published. Drawing on Godwin’s letters, Clemit reveals that he was not only a social theorist adapting lessons from the French Revolution for England but a moralist who built on his past as a Dissenting Minister to combat English subjugations of Ireland. Her study enables us to read his work as both belonging to and transcending discursive traditions of his time.

Richard Bourke uses historical knowledge to interpret the claims of the pivotal twentieth-century political theorist, John Rawls. Rawls surely wanted his work to address political practice as well as political theory, but Bourke contends that the relationship of Rawls’ theory to political action was radically incomplete. This is partly due to the disciplinary isolation of moral philosophy and politics that had begun to take shape a generation before, as well as the changed landscape of public power that marked the Western world after World War II. Bourke traces how intellectual perspectives in the humanities and social sciences were being recast in unhistorical ways, as history and political thought seemed so deeply stained by the powers of fascism and Soviet-style communism. American economic and political power allowed its intellectuals to look down upon the political histories of the defeated or devastated, while economic prosperity and political recovery in Western Europe and the UK depended on the self-interested generosity of the USA. Simultaneously, the civil rights movement was finally making progress in calling for the extension of equal citizenship to African-Americans. Political progress seemed probable. The Rawlsian slogan of “justice as fairness” provided a philosophical roadmap.

How can a better historical understanding of Rawls’s political philosophy or theory help us better understand his arguments for justice? Bourke notes that Rawls’s philosophical character reflected his stern, Protestant upbringing and high perch in esteemed universities (Oxford, Cornell, Harvard). He also identifies the crucial role played in Rawls’s argument of his view that the Wars of Religion marked the most salient historical phenomenon of modernity. Rawls understood that his theory needed to remedy the most important conflicts afoot — philosophical and political. For Rawls, the Wars showed that religious differences could not be suppressed yet had to be regulated in a constitutional political order. The mode for so doing became the two principles of justice adhered to by means of an up-dated state of nature hypothesis called “the original position”. Since he viewed political conflict as embedded primarily in belief, not power, a political theory that declawed moral and political convictions would diminish conflict and enhance harmony. Ultimately, we would find ourselves in what Rawls called “a social union of social unions” where politics would be kind. In his last theoretical contribution, Rawls extended the original position to international politics so as to promote a “law of peoples” (cf. Kant’s late work on history and progress). Rawls’s political theory appealed to our academic moralities and ignored many of the currents and undercurrents of actual politics. Perhaps they were just particulars embraced by his universals, but perhaps not. In any case, he does not broach that issue. For some of his readers who take note of the book’s adoration, this avoidance converts Rawls’s work from a political theory to a politically harmful ideology. Less tendentiously and more paradoxically, it may be that Rawls’s effort to whitewash or escape conflicts in history and politics was part and parcel of his effort to embrace American diversity and equality without damaging its traditions of liberty. And it might be that Rawls’s sublime perspective on political practice made possible his theoretical creativity even as it also proved to be the Achilles’ heel of his work. In turn, it highlights political and historical tensions between theory and practice that occur when their treatments are mutually isolated.

Writing about political philosophy and the uses of history, Quentin Skinner reinforces his long-standing argument for attending to the intentions of past thinkers — what they were doing — in order to know the meaning of what they wrote — what they were saying. Skinner has made this point consistently during a long and fertile career that has importantly influenced work in history, political science, and philosophy while fending off critics from many corners. I won’t rehearse those debates. Rather, I want to insert Skinner’s treatment of Hobbes’s meaning of liberty here (discussed in the essay for illustrative purposes) into the themes I have addressed indirectly so far — about understanding the roles of politics and political life for understanding history in the humanities and social sciences (an interest that Skinner shares). How do Skinner’s guides for interpreting the past constrain historical interpretation and how do political concerns belong in historical consciousness? Or, to add some edges, can one identify false history without becoming intentionally ideological or disingenuously neutral? These questions ask us to determine not only what writers in the past were doing but also what do when writing about them now.

Skinner’s major contributions to understanding the role of history in the humanities and social sciences entail the contemporary benefits of historical reconstruction. Not unlike Collingwood but moving beyond him (with the help of L. Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, inter alia), Skinner wants us, for example, to acknowledge in a fundamental way what Hobbes was doing in writing about liberty in his Leviathan. Finished amid the turmoil of the long English Civil War, that work seeks to reconcile liberty or freedom and authority (as power over) — each of which was threatened with violence and political catastrophes. What was Hobbes’s concept of liberty? Skinner answers this question (at least in part) by identifying and explaining how Hobbes dissolved the opposition between liberty and political power by reconceiving the former in a way that didn’t threaten the latter — that is, liberty as freedom from interference or impediments whose regulation then could be left to a Sovereign endowed with unitary public authority. Hobbes had put paid the republican conception of liberty, which (from the Romans forward and more densely in Athenian democracy) had entailed political self-government. Correlatively, to read Hobbes as an apologist for capitalism or a clever proponent of modern democracy is, for Skinner, not attending to what Hobbes was doing. For Hobbes had no views about “capitalism,” if anyone did in mid-seventeenth century England, and Hobbes explicitly worried about the political instability wrought by democracy (in its seventeenth century garb). Yet — and especially in Hobbes’s wake — it also is implausible to say that aspects of Hobbes’s thought do not contribute to capitalist ideology or states and ideologies that inform the anti-republican features of (what are commonly known as) modern, liberal democracies. Nonetheless, Skinner is right to argue that those historical forces were not engineered by Hobbes. Give to Hobbes what is Hobbes’s and to other forces what is theirs.

Skinner never claims that he has said all there is to say about, e.g., Hobbes’s concept of liberty. Need it be re-said, the interpreter’s historical focus stems from their own concerns. Yet Skinner would like to see us bolster the thought and action of republican liberty, viz., the centrality of the status and power of political self-governance in society (even as he does not write about the practicality of that venture). So the issue in weighing Skinner’s arguments is the relative authority of what becomes known about a concept from the historical author’s intentions and discursive, ideological context relative to other historical factors. For example, how does the deliberate deployment of a concept (e.g., republican liberty) relate to other institutionally and economically motivated currents of power? There is no one right answer to that question, and the alternative need not be a logic of one kind or another. If history concerns actions (wherever they occur) that affect and effect the public realm, all of the relevant factors warrant historical accounts. Some complaints about Skinner’s work may stem from mistakenly reading his accounts of past political thinkers and their thought as not only necessary but necessary and sufficient modes of historical understanding. Opting for the latter would display the arrogance that historical consciousness would inhibit.

The Roads Ahead

There is another issue about history in the humanities and social sciences raised by Skinner’s essay and his work more generally that reaches beyond his own mode of historical interpretation, namely the identification of historical relevance. The republican tradition Skinner values was historically generated by individuals of limited provenance living in a highly stratified society. To what extent does that make the republican idea of liberty, not to mention its rejection by Hobbes, available for those of us who favor, say, universal adult suffrage; equal, public roles for women, and less serene authority for leaders over the led in the global politics of the twenty-first century? Here, the questions raise (from a different angle) the matter of what belongs to a “concept” and how the past partakes in our study of it. If history illustrates politics in society, our social life is historical and power-laden at its core.  While power varies with its social exercise, major links clearly connect political thought now and in the past. But those connections will be variable. As a result, useful historical writing always can exist and will be political. That does not mean, however, that political history in the broad sense calls for identification of the politically correct or prescribing a particular approach to historical knowledge. Politics without politicization! Moreover, assigning marks of Cain on individuals or groups in the past because of “who they are” (as opposed to what they have done) just recasts injustice. Despite the diversity of critical intelligence today, I would not be content with putting humanity’s fate in the hands of the presently enlightened but historically ignorant.

So differences between present codes of conduct and those of the past need to be hashed out in the realm of public argument, both within and outside the academy. How much gravity do we allow history to have? Where shall freedom of inquiry take us if we maintain fidelity to the past? These are irreducibly political questions that do not appear front and center of this volume. The search for political understanding appears in this book about historical understanding as mostly a synthetic enterprise, indirectly practiced. Despite the abiding presence of political phenomena in history, these concerns about political life are not given perquisites of their own. But that is not a drawback of the volume, because if it gave much more attention to explicitly political matters, it would be a different book and not possess the value it has. The book usefully identifies many roads we ought not to travel when practicing the humanities and social sciences. Yet it’s worth keeping in mind that intellectual attitudes that categorically isolate the political from the historical are modern conventions. History originated in antiquity as an exercise in political education (broadly understood) and harbored that purpose until the twentieth century. It’s not clear that their links have been irredeemably severed. After all, Collingwood connected his rapprochement of philosophy and history to the search for “moral and political wisdom”.3 And the pressing phenomena of our day — such as the many forms of domination, the mutilation of the earthly habitat, waste, and inequalities that enforce hierarchies — do not fit within today’s disciplinary boundaries, even as history surely can provide critical illumination.

Since Socrates’ critical inquiries were judged by Athenian political authorities to be intolerable (after they had been acceptable for 30+years) and Plato sought refuge in the novel institution known as “the Academy,” philosophical discourse in the West has had to tread carefully when dealing with political power and social conventions. Amid academic groves, critical thought has endeavored to secure its own territory, relatively immune to the ongoing turmoil taking place beyond these confines. When it comes to appreciating the role of political life in historical understanding, however, the security of academic perspectives only can be provisional — even if the protection academia provides is deserved.

The issue is whether we can determine the difference between the use and abuse of politics in historical study, in the humanities and social sciences, and if so how? To be sure, the problem of politics for understanding the past cannot be easily solved, in this book or elsewhere. For it speaks to every society’s fraught relationship to politics, which sews the bits of society together even as it also tears them apart. History records politics as a distinctive kind of practice, open and yet decisive like no other, an intersecting array of thoughts and actions drawn from all walks of life that address the well-being of collectivities. Yet this morass of phenomena called the practice of politics needs to be clearly and widely understood, as a dependent and independent kind of power and ethics that publicly traffics in disguises. How should it be treated in relation to history and the academy? At the very least, it deserves regular intellectual attention as a feature of our past, even as it cannot easily sustain a fixed, disciplinary home. So politics could be said to indelibly mark history in the humanities and social sciences; its mark is real, blurry, and in need of our vigilance. In the meantime, this volume demonstrates the importance of investing history more fully and genuinely in the work of the academy, now seriously beleaguered as its common frames of reference, justification, and political support disintegrate. For historical understanding and consciousness make possible valuable ways of moving society forward, against its grain.

Reviewer:

John R. Wallach was Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York from which he retired in 2022. His most recent book is Democracy and Goodness: A Historicist Political Theory (2018).