General features

In this chapter we sketch a body of political thought that became predominant in the second half of the twentieth century among academic political philosophers, primarily in the English-speaking world, but increasingly elsewhere, too. To call this type of political thought ‘analytical’ may not be particularly revealing, but no other term better describes the movement in question. Sometimes ‘liberal political theory’ is used, and there is indeed a close connection between analytical theory and liberalism. But that label is in one way too broad and in another too narrow for this kind of political thinking: too broad because liberalism has assumed many different philosophical guises in the course of a history much longer than that of our subject; and too narrow because those who engage in this kind of political theory use methods of analysis and techniques of argument that are not confined to liberals.

Indeed, the political theorists and philosophers of the analytical school often disagree sharply over questions of practical politics, and some have embraced positions, such as Marxism, that have been historically hostile to liberalism. They form a school not because of a common ideological stance, then, but because of certain shared assumptions about the aims and methods of political thought. These assumptions fall under the following five headings.

Introduction

The character of Marxism in Europe during the middle of the twentieth century was profoundly marked by the collapse of the Second International in 1914 and by the defeat of the working-class movements in Western Europe in the following two decades. This collapse meant that the centre of gravity of Marxist thought initially moved east, where it was soon suppressed by the rise of Stalin. Unlike the previous generation of Marxist theoreticians, most of the thinkers grouped under the rubric of ‘Western’ Marxism were not important figures in political parties. They tended to be academics rather than activists, writing in a period of declining working-class activity and therefore in comparative isolation from political practice. Thus philosophy, epistemology, methodology and even aesthetics bulk larger in their works than do politics or economics – though all were insistent on the political implications of even their most abstruse writings. In a period when parliamentary democracy became normal throughout the advanced capitalist countries and their economies enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth, an atmosphere of resigned pessimism spread among many Marxist intellectuals – a pessimism that was not alleviated by considering the repressive nature of Soviet bureaucracy. Geographically, Marxist thought was concentrated in Germany, France and Italy, countries with large Communist parties. Whereas Marx started with philosophy and moved to economics, the typical thinkers of Western Marxism have moved in the opposite direction and in some cases sought inspiration in philosophers anterior to Marx – Spinoza, Kant and, above all, Hegel.

Since the start of the modern political era, if not longer, most people in almost all countries have believed that the incidence of international war is most likely to be reduced if countries repudiate aggression yet maintain armed forces, and if necessary also military alliances, strong enough to stop others being tempted into expansionism by the prospect of easy pickings – a deterrent stance whose credibility requires a perceived willingness to fight.

This majority viewpoint is here labelled ‘defencism’ because it regards national defence efforts as the best prophylactics against war and believes that self-defence is a sufficient justification for fighting (Ceadel 1987, ch. 5). Its rejection of aggression distinguishes it both from militarism, which glorifies fighting and believes that the conquest of weak states by strong ones advances civilisation, and from crusading, which believes that aggressive force is justified where by promoting justice it ultimately contributes to peace (Ceadel 1987, chs. 3 and 4). Frequently summed up by the Latin tag si vis pacem, para bellum (‘if you want peace, prepare for war’), defencism was generally treated by its supporters as a self-evident truth until early in the Cold War when a ‘realist’ school of academic students of international relations began to articulate its intellectual assumptions in order to justify them. However, it has long been associated with an ethical tradition which has attempted to delimit the circumstances in which a ‘just war’ can be declared (jus ad bellum) and the methods of fighting which can be used in its name (jus in bello) (Johnson 1975; 1981).

Modern social theory offers three main models of the state: an instrumentalist, a realist and a pluralist. These models can be respectively represented by the names Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Of those three theorists, perhaps only Marx can claim to be a key originator of ‘his’ model of the state. In Weber’s political sociology the influence of political realism stretching back at least as far as Machiavelli and Hobbes is quite transparent. Furthermore, while rejecting any form of socialism and what he took to be the economic reductionism of Marxist theory, Weber nevertheless sought to retain elements of a materialist methodology denuded of its original political aim. Finally, Weber’s conception of power as an expression of will, and his view of both politics and society as increasingly rationalised (and ‘disenchanted’) and as sites of eternal struggle owe a great deal to his reading of Nietzsche. His achievement might be described as one of synthesising elements of realism, materialism and nihilism, and of translating these into the language of the modern social sciences. In Durkheim’s political sociology the influence of both French and German political theory is no less evident. His view of the state as the deliberative organ of political societies and as the guardian of their conscience collective echoes Rousseau’s general will, French socialist thought (in particular Saint–Simon’s) and Comte’s positivist approach to the study of society. Moreover, his emphasis upon the normative role of secondary associations (as both a source of identity and as a counter-balance to the growing power of the state) has precedence not only in Montesquieu and Tocqueville, but also in those German political theorists who tried to rescue elements of the ‘Standestaat’ (polity of estates) for a modern pluralist society. Durkheim’s objective was to use scientific method to show how the individual and the social, the value of freedom and the requirement of solidarity, might be reconciled.

Two interrelated issues are central to Islamic political thought in the twentieth century: the relationship between religion and politics and the role of the Islamic heritage in modern society. The treatment of these issues began in the nineteenth century, in the context of Muslim societies’ encounter with the West. Commencing with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1789–1803), and extending through a period of Western Christian missionary activities in Muslim countries, Muslim educational missions to Western countries and, finally, to colonial rule, Muslim societies came into contact with modern Western ideas and ways of life. Through this encounter, the view of Western material progress was impressed on these societies. It was expressed in orientalist constructions of the East and in the apologetic and defensive discourses of the indigenous intellectuals. In Arab and Islamic thought, the problem of nahda (renaissance) crystallised. In Istanbul, the seat of Ottoman power, ideas of reform were developed and debated. Muslim reformist views also took shape in India. In Iran, the era in which modernising ideas and concepts were introduced became known as the asre bidari (period of awakening) (Mirsepassi 2000, p. 56; Gheissari 1998, pp. 14–15). By the end of the nineteenth century, modernist thought integrated nationalist principles and ideas.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Muslims were chiefly concerned with the problem of civilisational stagnation. The main problématique was formulated in terms of a renaissance project for Muslim societies. The articulation of this problématique was shaped by the encounter with the West in the modern period. Various intellectual positions were formed during this period of encounter, ranging from Islamic modernism to secularism.

Modernism is a term of Anglo-American provenance with both literary-critical and art-historical variants. It arose in the 1920s (Sultan 1987, p. 97), but did not become popular until the two decades after 1945 when formalist criticism held sway. Such ‘new critics’ thought of modernism as an approach to literature and the arts, emerging just before the First World War and dominant in the interwar period, that emphasised aesthetic autonomy and formalism, detachment and irony, mythic themes, and self-reflective attention to acts of creation and composition. The novels of Joyce and Woolf, the plays of Pirandello and Yeats, the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and the abstract art of Kandinsky and Mondrian were paradigmatic. The term was then appropriated by Western Marxists debating the properly revolutionary approach to aesthetics and cultural critique. More recent usage has greatly expanded and somewhat altered the concept, but it remains historiographical in the sense that the artists, writers and movements considered modernist by the critics rarely used the term to refer to themselves. It also remains essentially contested; there is no single, widely accepted usage. I will therefore begin by indicating how it is being used here.

In the late 1890s Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who had been trained as a Viennese neurologist, created a new field, psychoanalysis, which was designed to understand and treat neurotic afflictions. Although not a political thinker per se, Freud contributed indirectly, and some of his followers directly, to modern political theory. Politically, Freud was something of a conservative liberal, sceptical in outlook and suspicious of utopian schemes. His followers did not always follow him faithfully down the trail he had blazed in the new discipline of psychoanalysis; nor did all agree with his political views. Some were conservative to the point of reaction, others radical Marxists and utopians. Some revised Freudian theory almost beyond recognition. All were alike, however, in finding in Freud the outline and essentials of a new and fruitful way of thinking about man and society.

Freud’s thought

An essential key to Freud’s thinking about psychopathology lies in the character of the last days of the Hapsburg Empire. A yawning gulf between reality and official ideology stimulated a general intellectual revolt and a search for the actualities beneath the pious formulae of public truth. This uprising was led by those ideally placed to see the discrepancy because they had nothing to gain from accepting the official view: the educated Jews. Mordant irony was their weapon for piercing the veil of the structure of formal beliefs. The cultural conflict between East and West that had its vortex in Vienna’s cosmopolitan intellectual life, and the sense that liberal culture was on the verge of being undermined, would be reflected throughout Freud’s mature thought (Zweig 1953; Roazen 1968; Johnston 1972; Schorske 1979).

The halcyon days

The founders themselves would have been keenly sensitive to the diversity of motives and models underlying what we now know as ‘the’ welfare state. Bismarck’s conservative corporatist version built on frankly neofeudal foundations to buy social peace. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s social democratic model aimed to generate more Swedish babies (Tilton 1990). The British welfare state was principally the product of two renegade Liberals, Lloyd George and Beveridge (Beveridge 1942). The American welfare state was a patrician Democrat’s noblesse oblige response to the Great Depression, relieving distress among the old and disabled, the widowed and the chronically ill (Hofstadter 1948, ch. 12).

These distinctive trajectories are regularly revisited by theorists of the welfare state, some in search of typologies (Titmuss 1974, ch. 2; Esping-Andersen 1990; Goodin et al. 1999), others simply revelling in the utter uniqueness of their own country’s distinctive history and particular programmes (Skocpol 1992; Castles 1985). As a matter of historical record, no doubt they are right. In terms of policy analysis likewise, causes and consequences of different welfare regimes sometimes clearly matter (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981).

Still, the received view of ‘the welfare state’ that has passed into contemporary political thought is of a much more unified phenomenon. In popular memory and broader political discourse ‘the welfare state’ was something born of shared wartime suffering and the Great Depression; it was animated by the desire to meet needs and promote social equality; and it operates on and through broadly capitalist economies managed along broadly Keynesian lines.

The welfare state – the overriding objective of domestic politics in most developed Western states during the first half of the twentieth century – was a product of fundamental changes in the conceptualisation both of welfare and of the state. Evolving accounts of human nature and of the interdependence between individual and society were supplemented by structural experimentation with various measures intended to secure the realisation of those understandings. They were also accompanied by competing ethical and conceptual interpretations of rights, duties, responsibilities and agency. Moreover, they were nourished within opposing ideological families that sought to be sharply distinguished from one another, yet displayed overlapping and complex configurations of ideas. Variations in time and space account for some important differences of emphasis, but also demonstrate that shared pools of ideas were drawn upon from which these local divergences emanated.

Ideological disparities

At its zenith in the mid-twentieth century, the welfare state was frequently defined as one in which the power of a democratic state is deliberately used to regulate and modify the free play of economic and political forces in order to effect a redistribution of income (Schottland 1967, p. 10). This definition, like any other, conveys a particular interpretation, in this case one that presupposes a state-instigated deviation from a market norm, as well as the absence of ‘modification’ or intervention in earlier welfare arrangements – both highly contestable assumptions. It also fails to differentiate between the practices of welfare as insurance and as assistance, or between welfare as the guaranteeing of minimal material conditions and welfare as human flourishing in broad, even optimal senses.

‘Christian democracy’ can generally be understood as the strategy whereby practising Christians, the majority of them Catholic, met both the challenges and opportunities presented by contemporary political societies and states. During its initial phase, Christian democracy constituted the Catholic church’s response to the advent of mass politics and the secular and socialist collectivist movements that first raised the ‘social question’. Then it came more or less to coincide with the branch of Catholic political thought that sought to reconcile Catholicism to the pluralist and democratic state. Finally, Christian democracy turned into the dominant, and successful, form of political Catholicism – the doctrine chosen by those Catholics who accepted that there should be a free competition for power, and sought to defend their ideas and interests and ensure the implementation of their programmes.

The experience of participating in various types of associations and trade unions led Catholics to organise themselves into political parties which both attracted an increasingly broad consensus and became ever more powerful. The exercise of power meant their initial purpose of winning back both state and society for Catholicism gradually gave way to the pragmatic management of the prevailing problems, especially among those parties that ruled certain European countries for long periods. Despite becoming more secular and habitually adopting a centre-right stance, Christian Democratic parties nevertheless remained faithful to certain aspects of their original programmes. These allegiances differentiated them from the various conservative parties, even if, like them, Christian Democrats opposed leftist or socialist parties.

Natural philosophy was “the most widely taught discipline at the medieval university.”We may get an idea of the extent of the subject in what has been called its classical century, 1277-1377, by looking at the contents of John Dumbleton's mid-fourteenth-century Summa of Logic and Natural Philosophy. After a first part on logic, the major headings are

1. II. First principles, matter and form; opinions about substantial forms; how qualities are intended and remitted.

2. III. On motion in the categories of place, quality, and quantity. On the causes of motion. How velocity is produced and caused. How alteration and augmentation are measured. The definitions of motion and time.

3. IV. On the nature of the elements and their qualities. If each element has two qualities in the highest degree. The action and reaction of elements on each other. The relations of elemental and qualitative forms. Density and rarity and their variation. How the powers of natural bodies depend on their magnitudes. The relative weights of pure and mixed bodies.

4. V. On spiritual action and light. Whether light belongs particularly to some element or compound. On the nature of the medium receiving spiritual action, such as light. On the variation of spiritual action in a medium. Whether spiritual agents act instantaneously or in time.

5. VI. On the limits of active and passive powers. On the difficulty of action. On the limits of the powers of natural bodies by their natural places. [...]

What was it like to do philosophy in the Middle Ages? In this chapter I will try to answer that question by looking at relevant sociopolitical and economic circumstances, specific institutional settings for practicing philosophy, and several competing or cooperating intellectual currents. At the end of the chapter, I will say something about the place of authority in medieval thought, the philosophical sources available to medieval thinkers at different points in the period, and the literary genres into which they put their own ideas.

Briefly, the story runs as follows. What we know as medieval philosophy emerged in the late Roman Empire from a surprisingly complete mutual accommodation of Christian belief and classical thought. It then passed through centuries of dormancy in the West, while at the same time it began afresh in the Islamic world. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries philosophy reemerged in a new Europe, in altered formand against resistance. Then, both augmented and challenged by the work of Islamic and Jewish thinkers, it enjoyed in the thirteenth century a golden age of systematic analysis and speculation corresponding to a new degree of rationalization in politics and society. And finally? The significance of fourteenth-century thought remains contested, despite substantial recent scholarship demonstrating its brilliance. As my narrative ends, therefore, readers will need to move from context to content, acquainting themselves in succeeding chapters with the ideas and arguments on which their own assessment of medieval philosophy, not just the fourteenth century, must depend.

Histories of medieval philosophy often conclude with chapters on the disintegration of the scholastic synthesis or the defeat and neglect of scholasticism. From the standpoint of the present volume, where scholasticism and medieval philosophy are not seen as identical and where synthesis is not regarded as incontestably the supreme philosophic ideal, the situation is more complicated. An adequate history of the presence of medieval philosophy in later thought would require a volume in itself. In what follows some major points are touched on, including those bearing on defeat and neglect, but the story concludes with an account of the revival of interest in medieval philosophy of which this Companion is itself an effect and which it hopes to augment.

THE RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (P. J. FITZPATRICK)

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Oxford scholar would sooner have volumes of “Aristotle and his philosophy” than worldly attractions. For Bacon in 1597, philosophers of that tradition were cymini sectores – “hair-splitters,” say – whose writings can help us to draw distinctions. And for Molière in 1673, they were people who explained how opium induces sleep by saying that it has a “dormitive virtue.”

As I write these words, I can see on my shelves an attractively bound set of sixteen volumes, each bearing on its spine the words “J. Duns Scotus Opera Omnia.” One would be tempted to assume that these are The Complete Works of John Duns Scotus. Unfortunately, in medieval philosophy things are rarely so simple. Some of the works included in this set are not by Scotus at all, but were once attributed to him. Some of Scotus's genuine works, including his early Lectura on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, are not included. And what this set presents as Book I of Scotus's late (and very important) Reportatio is actually not the Reportatio at all, but another work whose authenticity and authority are vigorously disputed.

And there are further problems. The attractive modern binding belies the age of the edition itself. Open up any of the books, and what you will see is a photographic reprint of an edition first published in 1639. That edition (known as theWadding edition, after its editor) is not a critical edition, made by weighing all the manuscript evidence according to established principles of textual scholarship in order to determine, with as much precision and certainty as possible, exactly what Scotus said or wrote. In many cases the editor simply looked at the one or two manuscripts he had handy and transcribed what he found there, sometimes without much attention to whether the resulting text even made good sense.