This chapter addresses the relationship between rights and property and the role of each in determining the form of government. It begins by challenging J. G. A. Pocock’s division of the history of political thought into liberal and republican traditions, with the first based on a juridical conception of politics and the second focused on political participation to the exclusion of a concern with rights. David Hume, whose skepticism led him to deny that justice was a natural virtue, traced property rights to an appreciation of their social utility. In addition, like Montesquieu, Hume denied any necessary relation between the degree of political participation in government and the security of rights. Edmund Burke accepted that fundamental rights were ultimately derived from nature, but objected to how the French revolutionaries ignored the role of prescription in stabilizing justice. Ultimately, Hegel broke down the distinction between rights and welfare, drawing on Rousseau and Kant’s emphasis on freedom as the true source of justice and humanity.

John Rawls offers an instructive case study in how we have come to think about the relationship between historical conditions and moral standards in political philosophy. He is commonly taken to have rejuvenated political theory, though it makes more sense to see his work as an important development within ethics which was subsequently presented as the rebirth of political philosophy. The essence of Rawls’s thought is to be found in his construction of ideal values for whose practical viability he then argues. The venture, he claimed, was ‘realistically utopian’. But his emphasis fell on the theoretical justification of the construction rather than on the conditions of its practical viability. This parallels certain tendencies within economic theory where abstract modelling takes on a life of its own. But the nearest precedent for this procedure in the history of moral thought is Kant’s practical philosophy. Rawls saw the Kantian moral commonwealth – or kingdom of ends – as the structural equivalent of his own commitment to true democratic justice. The divergence, however, between their ideas is at least as significant as any appearance of overlap. Kant was profoundly sceptical about the moral capacities of human beings and projected his ideal as a goal to be actualised in the remotest future of a protracted world historical process. Moreover, forward momentum towards this end was to be driven by selfishness and competition rather than by an abiding devotion to the principles of justice. Rawls’s project is radically distinct from this vision. While paying scant attention to the historical conditions that might favour justice as fairness, he thought that a just regime would be realised through moral striving. Moreover, he claimed that progress since the Reformation had brought this outcome within reach.

This book explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Specifically, it examines the role of historical study in eight distinct subject areas: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches withing these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, this dependence was reduced under the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences. Statistical, analytical and scientistic approaches secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. Functionalism, structuralism, logical positivism, formalist criticism, behaviourism and economic formalism challenged context-specific forms of inquiry. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.