‘canonical’, or who have had substantial influence on thinkers more generally included in the canon, particularly for their ideas on legitimate rule and domination. Like any other survey of this kind, this one will, if only for reasons of space, leave out or briefly summarize the ideas of thinkers who may, in their various ways, be no less important than are the major figures treated here at greater length. Even major philosophers like David Hume, whose work belongs to the philosophical canon but for whom political theory was a more marginal concern, will get short shrift. We shall not, in general, deal with theorists best known for their theories of relations among states, with the notable exception of Grotius, whose views on private property and public jurisdiction are especially germane to our main themes. The primary aim of this study is to illustrate our social–contextual approach, and how it differs from others, by applying it to major thinkers whose status in the canon of political thought has been accepted by convention.
It should already be clear that the ‘social history’ of political thought on offer in this book departs from other accounts of Western political theory in the ‘early modern’ period, not least because it is based on a historical narrative that questions the conventional story of modernity. It aims, among other things, to disentangle the disparate threads of the ‘modern’. For example, it distinguishes ‘bourgeois’ from ‘capitalist’; it seeks to detach the culture of ‘reason’, or what postmodernists call the ‘Enlightenment project’, from the development of capitalism; it suggests that there was not just one overarching historical trajectory but several ‘transitions’ in the Western European passage to ‘modernity’, which have shaped divergent traditions of political thought; and it puts in question some fairly conventional wisdom, but also recent scholarship, on what it means to speak of ‘modern’ states and ‘modern’ ways of thinking about politics.
To those interested in the arcana of the discipline, it will also be clear that this social history departs from other contextual approaches not only in substance but in form and method. Like other modes of ‘contextualism’, it requires us not only to decipher texts but also to situate them in their specific historical contexts. Yet it entails an idea of ‘context’ that differs from others, in particular the school of contextualism that, in the Anglo-American academy, has dominated the history of political thought and especially the study of the early modern period, the so-called Cambridge School.
Both the Cambridge approach and our social history start from the premise that, to understand the ideas of political thinkers, we must know something about the questions they are seeking to answer. Both approaches treat those questions as constituted by specific historical conditions. Yet, while both accept that thinkers are likely to respond not only with a cool intelligence but with a sense of urgency and often passion, neither form of contextualism assumes that ideas can be simply ‘read off’ from a thinker’s situation within a given context. Great thinkers, indeed, are likely to be those who shed light on their historical setting by thinking at an unpredictable angle from it, often as uncongenial to their friends as to their enemies – such as Hobbes, an absolutist whose works were burnt by the monarchy. The Cambridge School would on the whole agree with our social history that even when thinkers offer idiosyncratic answers or seek to transcend the specificities of time and place, the questions confronting them are posed in specific historical forms. Where the two contextual approaches differ is in their conceptions of what form these questions take and how they are configured by the specificities of history.
For the Cambridge School, contexts are ‘discourses’, utterances or ‘language situations’. Social relations and processes are visible only as either literary and theoretical conversations, or the discursive transactions of high politics. A Cambridge School historian like Skinner is, to be sure, concerned with what theorists were ‘doing’ and why, given the range of political vocabularies available to them, they chose specific languages and strategies of argumentation, in the specific political circumstances of their own time and place and often for very specific political purposes. But the social conditions in which words were deployed are deliberately excluded. The period covered by Skinner’s history of political thought was marked by major social and economic developments that loomed very large in political theory and practice, yet he tells us virtually nothing about them. We learn little, if anything, about – for instance – relations between aristocracy and peasantry, about agriculture, land distribution and tenure or disputes over property rights, about urbanization, trade, commerce and the burgher class, or about social protest and conflict. John Pocock is generally more interested than is Skinner in the languages of civil society and political economy, not simply in the discourses of formal political theory; but his subject remains discourse and language. Social relations, if they are visible at all, appear in the form of conversations among literate elites.
The social history of political thought raises questions about how the political sphere itself is constituted by social processes, relations, conflicts and struggles outside the political space – producing, for instance, different patterns of state-formation in England and France and different traditions of political discourse, even while sharing common languages of politics. It raises questions about how social conflicts set the terms of political controversy – as, for example, in England, conflicts over property rights and even the very definition of property were playing themselves out between landlords and commoners before they reached debates in Parliament, philosophy or classical political economy.
It is not here simply a matter of attending to popular voices as distinct from, or in addition to, elite conversations. No one can deny that subordinate classes have tended to be voiceless in the historical record. To be sure, even when there remains no record of their discourse, if we are attentive we can detect their interactions with dominant classes in the great theoretical efforts devoted by their masters to justifying social and political hierarchies, and, of course, in theories of property. But the principal question is where we should look to discover the meanings and motivations of discourses, whether popular or dominant.
For the social history of political thought, it is not enough to track relations among thinkers, their utterances and texts; but nor is it enough to situate them in the historical context of very specific political episodes, such as the Engagement Controversy in which Hobbes may have sought to intervene (see below, p. 242) or the Exclusion Crisis, in which Locke was almost certainly engaged (see below, p. 256). There is no doubt that such historical moments may have far-reaching consequences in shaping political languages – as the revolutionary crisis of the Exclusion controversy shaped Locke’s political ideas. But for the social history of political theory, the questions confronting political thinkers are framed not only at the level of philosophy, political economy or high politics but also by the social interactions outside the political arena and beyond the world of texts.
To identify these questions is likely to require greater attention to long-term historical processes of a kind the Cambridge approach eschews altogether. We might, for example, situate Locke not only in the context of the Exclusion Crisis but also in the context of a long-term process like ‘the rise of capitalism’. This is not to enlist him as an advocate of the system we now know as capitalism, nor to attribute to him a kind of supernatural prescience about the eventual development of a mature industrial capitalism, nor even to credit him with anything like an idea of a ‘capitalist’ economy. The point is rather that a process of transformation in the property regime (the development of ‘agrarian capitalism’ discussed here in this chapter and in Chapter 7) was being contested in Locke’s own time and place, and was generating conflicts over the definition of property. We are much more likely to discern the issues at stake if we observe them, as it were, in the process of becoming, as existing social forms are being challenged or displaced.
Whether we choose to call the new property regime ‘agrarian capitalism’ or something else altogether, we may wish to point out that it had some bearing on what came after, not least on the emergence of ‘commercial society’, which figures very prominently in Cambridge School accounts of eighteenth-century England. But even if we choose to abstract Locke’s brief historical moment from any longer processes of social transformation, the least that can be said is that these social transformations generated
