1.1 INTRODUCTION

History of this, history of that: it's easy to assume that ‘history' is the same thing in each case, only with a different object. As every historian knows, however, that is not so.

History is not a universal lens that can be trained indifferently on any random thing suspended in that turbid fluid called ‘the past'. Rather, there is a mutually constitutive relationship between the different kinds of things historians study and the different kinds of history they write. The framing tropes of political history differ from those of cultural history, for example, and spin their objects distinctively in each case. If historians take such different approaches, however, what makes them all historians nonetheless? Is there a point at which they are not, in fact, doing history at all, but something else - law, for instance? And what is at stake in asserting such a point? The premise of this volume is that this is a conversation worth having following the ‘international turn' in history of political thought and the ‘historical turn' in international law. This gives practitioners of both apparently the same objects - the works of Hugo Grotius, for example, or at least the particular work of his called, in English translation, The Law of War and Peace (or, The Rights of War and Peace - whose title is it anyway?). If history of political thought and history of international law are different kinds of history, however, they will spin these texts each in their own way, so that through the eyes of one they are works of political thought, through the eyes of the other works of law. But what is it for a work to be political thought rather than law?

Before we begin to explore that distinction, it is worth considering what these two approaches might have in common in the way in which they engage the present. In some sense, of course, all history engages the present.

The past does not exist independently and on its own terms: what is past is so only in relation to the present, and therefore inextricably bound up with it. But the past is also something distinct from the present, something that is not present. History is the Janus-faced art that creates the past in the sense of a relationship with the present while simultaneously representing the past as something distinct from the present. The distinctive voice of the historian, the histor, depends on the ability to stabilise that distance by referring ‘out' from the story to the traces of the past - the letter in the archive, the stones in the desert, ‘the sword which was a sword once, in another grasp' - and to other stories read not as stories but as traces.^{^[1]} The poetry reminds us how even the most material traces are already storied in some way in the Western historical imagination. Even so, however, the past is not such traces, nor is history the facts that are constructed from them through shared conventions of reference and inference. History is the story we tell ourselves about what really happened outside the story, and those two things can never be entirely separated nor ever entirely fused unless we stop writing history altogether and content ourselves with archaeology and novels. (Sacred scripture, which fuses the inside and the outside, the story as story and the story as trace, is then a very complex and historically challenging third case.^{^[2]}) It is in the writing that this double face of history comes into relief, a graphic medium that draws lines around some things and effaces others, which just is to write the line between past and

present. As Paul Ricreur put it, ‘if one says that emplotment, say, concerns only the writing, one forgets that history is writing'.^{^[3]}

The question, therefore, is not about past and present in history generally, but whether history of political thought and history of international law have a kind of presentism built in that other kinds of history do not have - perhaps even to the extent that they elide the space for the distinctive duality of history and are therefore, in fact, not history at all.

The argument would be that the peculiar temporality both of thought and of law draws the history of each inexorably into the present, collapsing the history of political thought into political thought and the history of international law into international law. This argument has a long history within the history of political thought, the very name of which seems to tug it both ways, towards an intellectual history that is part of history and a history of philosophy that is part of philosophy.^{^[4]} It has generated a long-standing methodological debate that waxes and wanes but never entirely dies - partly because methodological statements, however sophisticated, can never be more than crude reflections of the complex thinking involved in even the simplest questions of actual practice (how do I paraphrase this passage of Grotius, for example).^{^[5]} There are those who want to pull the history of political thought firmly in one direction or the other. But many of its practitioners resist that attempt. Both in their methodological statements and, far more importantly, in their substantive histories, they have in different ways negotiated the space of, and for, history in relation to philosophy. ‘Far more importantly', not only because of the inevitable crudity of methodological statements, but more fundamentally because, as in all history, the past-present relationship is not propositional. It cannot be stated; it can only be written. What is distinctive to the history of political thought as a form of history is that the way in which it writes the borderline between past and present, as all history must, involves a second borderline, between history and philosophy. The Janus face of history of political thought, specifically, is that the representation of a past way of thinking is at the same time an act of political thinking in the present.

History in general is currently undergoing a new wave of self-examination as it engages with the question of the global, simultaneously with a new critical awareness of the relationship between timing and spacing concepts both at a macro and at a micro level (the ‘spatial turn').

The same is true of intellectual history and of history of political thought, as it grapples with the timing and spacing of the global in relation to the temporality of thought that has always been its concern. This endeavour is throwing up some of the old conundrums and some new ones, in which one might expect to find a good deal of common ground with the more recent historical turn within international law. The initial dialogue, however, has seen a series of sharp exchanges in which the relationship between history of political thought and history of international law has been pushed into a question of the relationship between history and law per se, marked by a polemical drive to establish an antagonism between the two. Somewhat to the surprise of historians of political thought, who are used to being accused by their colleagues in history of not really doing history at all, ‘history of political thought' has become a stand-in for ‘history' itself. Or at least, a stand-in for a pre-global form of history inadequate to the new dimensions of time and space, unlike certain other forms of intellectual history which have the capacity to rise to the challenge and on which international law can therefore happily draw. And it has been used in exactly the same way from the other side, to denounce those new dimensions as merely the latest inflated iteration in a long and tired tradition of metaphysical pseudo-history. As a result, the question of the relationship between political thought and international law as objects of history has been pushed into the background or even foreclosed altogether.

In what follows I want to consider the temporality of history of political thought in more depth by exploring two different directions in which it can be taken. With both, I consider the consequences of those different directions for thinking about law, aiming thereby to reopen the dialogue between political thought and international law from a different angle. But one final point about history in general needs to be made before I start.

Historians, when they feel under pressure, have an unfortunate tendency to define themselves in terms only of one face of history, the study of the past as distinct from the present. They speak as if the historian's distinctive voice were constituted purely by stabilising the reference ‘out' from the story, and they underline this emphasis by talking in terms of documents as sources, facts as independent historical truths and history as the reconstruction of what really happened on the basis of them. It is true that no historian can practise their craft without an alignment with this distinctive way of seeing (‘objectivity') and the scholarly ethos it involves. At the same time, however, historians know full well that history is not sources or facts, but a story in which the reconstruction of what really happened cannot be separated from the construction of their own narrative of what really happened. It is both together that make an account historical as opposed to either factual, fictional or scriptural. To focus purely on the former, either in defending themselves or attacking others, both devalues the stories they tell and, importantly for the present contribution, flattens the distinction between different kinds of history. But this is not a point about history of political thought in particular, which, as suggested earlier, has an interface with philosophy that is not shared with all types of history. As we shall see, that interface is further complicated by the element of ‘political' in its object, which brings another party to the table: politics.

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Source: Brett Annabel, Donaldson Megan. History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International Cambridge University Press,2021. — 450 p.. 2021

1.1 INTRODUCTION

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