1.2 HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT AND POLITICS

History of political thought tends to be identified, somewhat to its practition­ers' unease, with something now generally known as ‘the Cambridge School'. The Cambridge School is in turn identified with the three figures understood to have initiated this scholarly movement between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, John Dunn, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner.

This proposition, now dubbed ‘contextualism', has sometimes been taken to constitute a self-sufficient methodology in itself.

Developing his methodological approach in the early 1970s, Skinner made speech act and political act coincide within a Weberian understanding of legitimation.^[9] He broadly accepted Weber's view of the state as holding a monopoly of legitimate violence within a given territorial area. Skinner was not particularly interested in the violence, however. Rather, it was the demand for and the production of legitimacy which on his understanding was the defining characteristic of politics as a form of shared activity. Unlike the use of force, legitimation can never be a unilateral action.

This picture furnishes a view of political languages as not simply those that contain the vocabulary necessary to refer to the agents, bodies and institutions that characterise a political system (‘king', ‘parliament', ‘the Home Office' rather than ‘slab' or ‘beam'). Rather, a political language is a legitimating language, one in which the normative dimension is explicitly articulated in value-laden terms having persuasive force in respect of a given public. Skinner called such a language an ‘ideology' and its use ‘ideological', but not in the usual pejorative sense of indoctrination, or as somehow involving false con­sciousness. Ideologies understood in this sense present a cut-and-dried polit­ical world view, fashioned by political-intellectual masters to be swallowed and reproduced whole, thus suppressing the political agency of their con­sumers. Legitimating languages in Skinner's sense, however, and in the work of J.G.A. Pocock and others, are looser associative clusters of vocabulary that rely on the agency of a political public to fill in the gaps.^[10] As such they typically appeal beyond the strictly political to moral, legal, aesthetic, reli­gious, logical and even natural scientific principles, and to other kinds of social, cultural and intellectual authority.

Ideology in Skinner's original sense, then, is not a corruption but constitutive of politics on his understanding, and any political speaker articulating a position in normative terms will use elements of existing ideology to make their case. That use could be a straightforward rearticulation (‘the king is the father of the people'); it could be a kind of ironic subversion (a satirical print, captioned ‘The Father of the People', depicting the king surrounded by dozens of illegitimate children); or it could be a more thoroughgoing innovation within language which, if successful, could change the terms of political discourse as a whole (linguistically repositioning the association between ‘king' and ‘father' as a marker of despotism, for example). In all these cases, the ideological use of language is ‘political' in a stronger sense than the everyday and unselfconscious use of common political terms of reference, wherein the ideological inflection is so weak as to reduce its political valence nearly, though not quite, to simple description. Not quite, for on this analysis both kinds of usage are involved in the constitutive role of political language in politics as a form of life. This connects the different levels and registers of political discourse, and it also connects that discourse to non-discursive features such as the layout of a parliamentary debating chamber or a princely palace. As we have already seen, all these elements of politics are further connected with broader discursive forms and institutions of social, cultural and intellectual life.

What does this approach mean for actually writing the history of political thought? The answer is that, while its distinctive way of joining up the publicity of language with the politics of legitimation precludes certain narrative choices, it leaves open a wide range of others.

Nevertheless, it remains true that the republished work constitutes a new speech act in a new context. Texts have no continuous identity as acts, even though Hobbes's Leviathan may have a more or less continuous identity as a text. More or less, because it is not, in fact, the same text in Chinese transla­tion, say, or even in another European language; with a new editorial fore­word, with or without footnotes or an index.

307-30; Warren Boutcher, ‘Unoriginal Authors: How to Do Things with Text in the

Renaissance', in Brett and Tully (eds.), Rethinking the Foundations, 73-92.1 make the case that history of political thought can use deconstructive techniques of reading in ‘What Is Intellectual History Now?’, at 123.

¹³ See Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), who talks of the paratext as ‘a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public’ (‘Introduction’, p. 2, emphasis in the original).

¹⁴ See Peter Gordon, ‘Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas’, in McMahon and Moyn (eds.), Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, 32-55; critical response in Matthew Specter, ‘Deprovincialising the Study of European Ideas: A Critique’, History and Theory 55 (2016), 110-28. Gordon allows a continuing role for context in the practice of intellectual history, but argues that it cannot be exhaustive of a historical approach. On this I agree (in fact, I think many ‘Cambridge school’ historians would agree, since, as Gordon acknowledges, they do not have a shared methodological approach). But, by the same token, the polemical language of ‘provincialism’ and ‘containment’ seems to me to be misplaced, or at least to target a straw man. the movement of meaning with which international law is necessarily concerned.^[13]

Two points might be made in response. The first is to reiterate that historians of political thought in this vein are not looking for any kind of meaning, but for political meaning; not for sense of the words, but for the politics of their utterance. It is for this reason that they are interested in texts as acts in a very specific sense. If a historian, including an intellectual historian or a historian of law, is not interested in text-as-act in this sense, then the spatiotemporal parameters involved in the contextual approach are not a limitation in some way; they are simply irrelevant. The question, then, is whether history of international law has anything to gain from seeing texts as acts in this way. I am not qualified to answer that question, only to open an invitation to dialogue, as I shall do in conclusion. For the moment I make only the general point that, while the framing tropes and rhetoric associated with the global turn in all disciplines tend to paint any kind of ‘limit' (conceptual or otherwise) pejoratively, contextual parameters do allow a historian to capture a peculiar feature of certain discursive situations that would otherwise be elusive - the politics of republishing Leviathan in Chinese two centuries later, say. It might certainly be possible to say that international law has no interest in this kind of politics or this kind of meaning at all. But that appears to involve a thesis, not only about contextualism, or about the relationship between history and law, but about the relationship between law and politics. It is all three terms, then, history, law and politics that need to be put in question simultaneously.

Now it might be objected here that what I have just said is disingenuous. For, the objection runs, history of political thought in this vein is not looking only for political meaning; ‘contextualism' claims that if you don't look for that kind of meaning, ‘meaning in context', you are not doing history at all. It is certainly true that Skinner's original thesis in ‘Meaning and Understanding' was intended to cover not only history of political thought but the entirety of ‘history of ideas' or intellectual history. One reply to this objection, then, is simply to say that whatever Skinner's ambitions in that essay, its methodology in practice works much better for history of political thought than for other kinds of intellectual history, precisely because of the politics involved.^[14] And, when Skinner came to develop it into a working methodology for history of political thought in the early 1970s, he made those politics explicit, as we have seen. It is perhaps for this reason that contextual historians of political thought are less invested in ‘Meaning and Understanding', specifically, than are their critics. Another reply might be to point out that this objection, insofar as it is an objection relative to history of international law, implicitly assumes that such history is a kind of intellectual history; but that is precisely one of the things in question.^[15] Finally, and this leads to the second point of my response, it may be true that some intellectual historians do indeed see the contextual principle as per se definitive of a historical approach to meaning. Nevertheless, the collapse of ‘historical' into ‘contextual' is not a necessary consequence of this way of thinking and not all historians of political thought either must, or do, endorse it.

Here it is necessary to be quite precise about the work that contextual parameters are doing in this kind of history. They provide, as I have suggested, explanatory traction on a very specific phenomenon, and it is this traction that allows ‘context' to be weaponised against other kinds of meaning and other kinds of history. Contextual explanation, or making plain, however, is not the same thing as contextual interpretation, or making sense. Context might make plain the character of an act, but it is not enough to make sense of it, historically speaking. To do so requires a further element of interpretation, a creative act of making sense which necessarily breaks the bounds of time and place as it involves a different kind of meaning: meaning as in historical sense, or significance within a story. What the contextual historian of political thought is aiming for is to bridge over between these two kinds of meaning. Crucially, however, this second kind of meaning is not simply layered on top of the first like icing on a cake. The two are mutually involved, and it is in the different ways of handling that relationship that the differing interpretative possibilities of contextual history of political thought lie. I explore those possibilities more fully in the next two sections. For the moment, the import­ant point is that in whatever way a contextual historian constructs the relation­ship between the two kinds of meaning, the materials for that construction do not come from the contextual principle alone.

To understand why, we need to see that the speech act, so central to this methodology and to the definition of ‘context', in fact lies in an ambivalent position at the intersection of the twin historiographical poles of speaker and language. It points in both directions simultaneously without being fully joined up either way. Making sense of the act involves closing the gap with one or other of the poles in ways that are not dictated by the approach but must be independently supplied by the historian. Consider on the one hand the gap between the speech act and the speaker, or the difference between writing ‘the politics of republishing Leviathan, as I just did, and ‘the politics of the republished Leviathan.^[16] You might be able to establish that a certain phrase had a certain meaning x, in the sense of illocutionary force or speech act, in a certain discursive context (by looking at contemporary dictionaries, for example, coupled with other contemporary accounts). You might even be able to say it was a fact. But you could never say it was a fact that, in saying that phrase in such a context, a certain person meant x. Meaning in this sense is never a simple precipitate of discursive context but always an interpretative move on the part of the historian. It involves contextual meaning, insofar as that can be established by reconstructing the discursive context, but also a range of other features of the historical situation that the historian has picked out as salient. And that kind of salience is governed not by the context, but by the story she seeks to tell, which in turn is governed by her broader historical and political commitments. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, with closing the gap between the speech act and the other pole of the method, that of language. To fold a contingent speech act into a larger-scale history of political discourse requires structuring motifs (such as evolution, revolution, teleology, coincidence) that again import the historian's broader historical and political commitments. In either case, historical meaning escapes the tight parameters of contextual explanation, as the shape of the story pulls the speech act into its own shape.

In what follows I try to put these two main points, about political meaning and about historical meaning, together, by sketching two interpretative direc­tions in which contextual history of political thought can be taken. It is not my intention here to construct another polarity, to try to force historians into one corner or another. My own commitments will inevitably emerge (that is of the essence of what I am saying), but there is a spectrum of available interpretative choices, and most historians of political thought would position themselves coherently somewhere between the extremes. Nevertheless, this rough and necessarily oversimplifying contrast may serve to bring out the further com­mitments involved in writing the history of political thought that are not contained in the bare principle of ‘meaning in context'. These are to do with the nature of politics, in the first instance, but behind them lie deeper commitments on the nature of power, of agency, indeed of reality itself. Accordingly, they bring back into play the relationship between history and philosophy with which we originally began, and which has since been rather lost in the melee. With each of them, I consider the place of law within their differing co-constructions of history and politics, and therefore their implica­tions for the relationship - and for renewed dialogue - between history of political thought and history of international law.

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