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Quentin Skinner's magisterial The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was first published in 1978. A commemorative volume appeared almost thirty years later. My aim in this paper is less to revisit this last discussion by questioning either the importance or the impact of Skinner's book, both of which seem to me undeniable, than it is to unsettle a few of the assumptions that not only inform The Foundations and much of the work that it inspired, but which are all too often taken for granted. In particular, I note some limitations both of Skinner's use of the term “modern” and of his understanding of political thought before concluding that it may be time to reconsider the category of modern political thought.

Gareth Dale could hardly have chosen a more propitious time to publish this substantial political and intellectual biography. Today, many years after his death in 1964, Karl Polanyi’s star is risin...

The cosmopolitanism of the European Enlightenment was mostly a limited matter of a Eurocentric anti-nationalism promoting the ideal of Europe as an harmonious system of balancing states. Against this background, Kant’s cosmopolitan vision stands out as more inclusive because, far from restricting its concerns to Europe, it proposes to bring all of humanity together by locating its different sections in a developmental framework that runs from the most primitive of human conditions to the fullest development of Man’s moral and intellectual capacities. Like the developmental schema posited by Voltaire and the Scottish Enlightenment, this vision locates most of humanity at some distance behind Western Europe. It produces the appearance of a cosmopolitan inclusiveness by means of an equally cosmopolitan differentiation.

Bibliography: Hindess, Barry: Patrick Chabal, The End of Conceit. Western Rationality after Postcolonialism, ERIS, 3-2015, pp. 144-146. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v2i3.23456

SummaryIan Hunter has made a name for himself as a critic of German university metaphysics, finding its progeny at work in places where many of us would not even think of looking, for example in the late twentieth-century celebration of theory in the humanities. Some of his recent work has focused on a rather different issue: the methodological task of making intellectual history empirical. Here he builds on Quentin Skinner's rationale for the Cambridge School's efforts to make the history of political thought more properly historical. Skinner's argument draws on the work of R. G. Collingwood, at least in its earlier versions, and on neo-Kantian tendencies in mid-twentieth century Oxford philosophy. Thus, in aligning his methodological programme with Skinner's argument, Hunter may risk bringing elements of university metaphysics back in another form.

At least since John Locke's observation (in his Second Treatise of Government, 1690) that “in the beginning, all the world was America”, Western thinkers have engaged in the practice of treating non-Western people as if they were living in the European past, a practice which remains pervasive within contemporary social and political thought. This article begins to chart the genealogy of this practice, exploring its classical (ancient Greek and Roman) antecedents as well as its European Renaissance and Enlightenment variants. We focus particularly, in this latter regard, on the European discovery of America and the revolt by sixteenth-century Protestant historians against the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.

The paper addresses two issues arising from Foucault's work. One concerns his treatment of liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, which is probably more familiar through the work of the (mostly) British ‘governmentality’ school, and the other concerns a comment on relations between the West and the rest in The Order of Things that seems to express an insensitive Eurocentrism. I argue that we cannot make sense of liberalism without grasping the place of this Eurocentrism in eighteenth/nineteenth century western thought.

Foucault's works are always a challenge, and this set of lectures raises more questions than most. The first and most obvious concerns his choice of title (the title given in the course summary pub...

How useful is the concept of global society ? This question has been raised in different ways by several contributors to IPS , most forcefully by Mathias Albert (2007), who argues that globalization theory needs to turn to theories of society. My initial response is to note that two claims are raised by this proposition: first, that there is a significant body of literature which might usefully be called “globalization theory”; and second, that, if we are to make progress in this contentious area then we should turn, not just to theories of society, but to the most advanced of these theories, and, specifically, to the work of Niklas Luhmann. Both claims are debatable. The first, I suspect, gives the literature on globalization greater credit than it deserves. As to the second, the theories of society Albert has in mind are those of sociology, so we can take his plea as calling on us to turn to a certain kind of sociological theory. Before questioning this claim, it is important to note that there is more to sociology, and to sociological theory, than theories of society (Osborne and Rose 1997). The claim that, if we are to understand major social developments, and thus have some hope of dealing with them, we should turn to the science of society, was first advanced by Auguste Comte (often credited with coining the name of this science, “sociology”) in his Plan of Scientific Work Necessary for the Reorganization of Society (Comte [1824] 1998). Comte argued, in effect, that French society was sick and that to address its problems it was necessary to identify how conditions in France differed from what was normal in a society of its kind, a task that he saw as requiring the location of contemporary France within a …

This note disputes Anthony Langlois’s (2007) argument: first, that liberalism is committed to the equal worth of all individuals; second, that the critics of liberal cosmopolitanism are really clos...

The familiar phrase in my title is usually understood as indicating that one has already experienced the topic under discussion and become bored with it. Here it flags the view, first, that all portions of humanity go through essentially the same historical stages that can be identified in the history of the West, and thus that, whatever our non-Western contemporaries may now be experiencing, the West has already ‘been there, done that’. This view also underlies the patronizing assumption that many in the non-Western world belong in the past of the Western present, that they are likely to have a poor understanding of their own pasts, which are merely truncated or incomplete forms of the past of the West itself. This destructive view, which is commonly, but not always, associated with a sense of Western superiority, is one of the foundations of modern Western cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I take the destructiveness of this view as a given and aim, rather, to explore its origins. I suggest that the most i...

This article addresses two questions relating to the modern Western treatment of contemporaries as belonging to the past; how has Western social thought come to treat belonging to the past as a bad thing, that is, as a kind of moral and intellectual failure; and how has it learned to assign some of our contemporaries to the world of the past. My response to the first question is in two parts. One examines the conventional modern division between past and present. The other considers the effects of Western social thought's equally conventional developmental understanding of humanity. In the section that separates these two discussions, I suggest that the answer to the question of how have we learned to assign some of our contemporaries to the past is to be found in the early history of modern imperialism.

Scholarly discussion has treated the account of the state of nature which Locke presents in his Second Treatise as neither an hypothesis nor a description but rather as a fiction. John Dunn, for example, claims that it is a `theoretical analysis of the fundamental relations of right and duty which obtain between human beings, relations which are logically prior to the particular historical situations in which all actual human beings always in fact find themselves'. Here Dunn presents a misleading account of Locke's argument, presumably, as the title of his paper suggests, in order to mount an argument of his own about the `political relevance' of Locke's work to a time when no one takes seriously the early modern idea of the state of nature. However, this article also has a more serious concern. I argue that the representation of the state of nature as a merely imaginary, `theoretical analysis' of social relations obscures the significance of the early modern idea of a state of nature, not only for the work of Locke and his near contemporaries, but also, more importantly, for the broader development of western social and political thought. The idea of an original condition of freedom and equality played a central role in Locke's argument, serving as a means both to undermine the view that humans were born into a natural condition of subjection to the rule of others and to justify European expropriation of land in the Americas. It also represented one end of a developmental continuum, running from the original, most primitive, condition of humanity through to the societies of contemporary western Europe, which was thought to encompass all sections of humanity. While the idea of an original asocial condition on which this continuum was based was later brought into question, a closely related developmental framework nevertheless informed later movements in history and the social sciences. After being abandoned in its original form, this category was finally revived in 20th-century political theory, this time precisely in the form that Dunn mistakenly ascribes to Locke. The article concludes by speculating on the relationship between these normative and empirical perspectives on the state of nature.

Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology addresses the battle between primitivism and modernism over the ancient economy, focusing especially on the contributions of three major figures, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley. Finally, a short Epilogue returns to the examination of Marx's puzzle and his manifestly unsuccessful attempt to resolve it. Mohammad Nafissi uses this discussion to put this dispute out of its misery by advancing his own resolution of the primitivist–modernist dispute. Unfortunately, the limitations he seeks to avoid are mostly those which the supporters of one or the other side have identified in the claims of their opponents. As a result, his attempted resolution fails to disrupt their shared assumptions regarding the special place of the ancient Greeks in human development.

Contributors to the History of Theory Seminar were invited to include ‘historical reflection’ on the emergence of the ‘moment of theory’, a period running from the late 1960s through to the early 1...

The period running from the late 1960s through to the 1980s is often seen as one in which theory assumed a particular importance in many areas of the humanities and social sciences. This paper focuses on the Althusserian component of this moment of theory in Britain, but it also reflects on the emergence of the form of historical understanding, and of the understanding of historical time in particular, in which such objects as ‘the moment of theory’, ‘the spirit of the age’ or ‘England in 1819’ can appear as objects of historical enquiry. The first section sketches some of the links between the Althusserian component of the British moment of theory and this broader issue, and I return to the latter in my final section. The intervening sections examine the Althusserian component more directly. After presenting Althusser's account of the concept of historical time I consider the ramifications of two features of his intervention in the realm of theory. One is that his distinction between Marxist sci...

Contemporary usage presents an opposition between states and terrorism, as if to suggest that terrorism is not an instrument of the state but something that is used against it. Yet the two most influential foundational myths of the modern states system suggest that the state's capacity for terror is the source of peace and order within the territorial community. It also makes other states think twice about attacking its territory. The author examines the ramifications of these myths and shows how they underlie conventional accounts of what is at stake in the war on terror.

There is little of value to be said about the concept of power as such. The term itself is best seen as invoking the ‘total structure of actions brought to bear’ by some on the actions of others. What is of interest, then, is not power as such but rather the special cases in which relatively stable configurations of power can be identified. Lukes' focus on domination obscures the significance of other configurations. One is the political power of the state, which Lukes simply takes for granted, focusing instead on the question of who has control over its use. Another, which overlaps with political power but is not reducible to it, is government of the state. The system of states is the site of a third major limitation in PRV‘s discussion, which is the point of the plural, states, in my title. Neither the American debate to which PRV made an influential late contribution nor Lukes' expanded discussion have much to say about the role of these configurations of power in the world today. A view of power that simply ignores them may be radical in certain respects but it is blinkered in others.

On 13 January 2004 Associated Press reported ‘Bush signs proclamation against corruption’. It barred entry into the USA of public officials from Latin America who had been accused of corruption and...

This article considers Michel Foucault's work on the rationality of government and the practices in which it has been implemented. Specifically, it develops a critique of Foucault's analysis of political reason in relation to the governmental significance of electoral politics, to liberal commitments to the promotion of individual liberty, and to the focus on government within states to the neglect of the international system and the problem of sovereignty.

L'A. developpe une analyse critique du traitement reserve dans les pays occidentaux, et plus particulierement en Australie, aux refugies et aux demandeurs d'asile. Il expose les liens et les contradictions existant entre ces politiques et le projet liberal de mondialisation, en tant que regulation et controle des populations a travers les marches

The government of populations within states and the government of states themselves within the international arena are intimately connected. Thus, in order to understand the character of citizenship in the modern world, it is necessary to locate it as part of a supra-national governmental regime in which the system of states, international agencies and multinational corporations play a fundamental role. A brief history of the modern system of states is followed first by an account of liberalism as a project of government emerging within that system, and secondly by an examination of how twentieth-century changes in the system of states have impacted on that liberal project. Where the liberal government of non-Western populations was once predicated on a denial of citizenship it is now channelled through the promotion of citizenship in states that are themselves increasingly subject to the rigours of the market.

This paper focuses on the distinguishing concern of the discourse of democratic deficit: namely, that there appear to be some striking discrepancies between democratic norms and institutional practice. I argue in this paper that the problem of democratic deficit is in fact the normal condition of the institutions of representative government. Indeed, early arguments in favour of representative government insist that it departs from and is superior to democracy itself. If representative government provides the predominant modern understanding of democracy, then democratic deficit is an integral part of its design.

James Tully's Strange Multiplicity uses the example of indigenous minorities in the white settler colonies of North America to develop a remarkably powerful critique of liberal constitutionalism's rule of uniformity. In proclaiming the identity of all persons before the law, he insists, liberal constitutional arrangements commonly discriminate against indigenous and other minorities. While the force of this critique is undeniable, it nevertheless takes at face value one of the central claims of liberal consitutionalism, namely, its claim to be based on the rule of uniformity. Examination of liberal reflections on the government of subject peoples, most of whom were regarded as being, in Mill's words, “not sufficiently advanced for representative government“, suggests a rather different picture. In place of the rule of uniformity we find a variety of alternatives but, most commonly, an insistence, first, that the government of such peoples should focus on their welfare and eventual improvement rather than ...

The distaste for the work of a colonial official, so clearly expressed in George Orwell's 'Shooting an Elephant', is often seen as reflecting a straightforward liberal commitment to freedom. This interpretation misrepresents both Orwell's standpoint and the character of liberal political reason. As a doctrine of government, liberalism is indeed committed to ruling over, and as far as possible to ruling through, the activities of free individuals. But it has also taken the view that substantial portions of humanity consist of individuals who are not -- or not yet -- capable of acting in a suitably autonomous fashion. This view results in a division of the world into settings in which individuals can normally be trusted to conduct themselves as autonomous rational agents and other settings in which they cannot be trusted to behave in this fashion. Examination of the consequences of this view for the practice of colonial government suggests a different interpretation of Orwell's account: it reflects...

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Michel Foucault's work on government has been his treatment of liberalism as a distinctive form of political reason. Liberalism is commonly regarded as a normative political doctrine or theory that treats the maintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself and therefore views liberty as setting limits of principle both to the legitimate objectives of government and to the manner in which those objectives may be pursued. Foucault's account of liberalism as a rationality of government also accords central place to individual liberty, which is seen as giving rise to a prudential concern that one might be governing too much. The suggestion is that, rather than pursue its objectives through the detailed regulation of conduct in the manner of police, it might be more effective for the government of a state to work through the maintenance and promotion of certain forms of individual liberty. According to this account, underlying the liberal fear of governing too much are two distinct but related perceptions of the population to be governed. It is seen first as containing a number of self-regulating domains of social interaction, and secondly as consisting of individuals endowed with a capacity for autonomous, self-directing activity. In liberal political thought, Foucault observes, the market epitomizes both perceptions, serving, in effect, as "a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects of excessive governmentality."1 Liberal political reason, then, sees individual liberty as a limit, not simply to the legitimate reach of government, but also to its effectiveness. More recent scholars have adapted this account of liberalism to the analysis of neoliberal attempts to govern through the decisions of autonomous individuals.

Liberal political thought has traditionally been hostile to the arbitrary power of rulers. It has, however, qualified this hostility through its promotion of what Locke calls ‘prerogative’, the need for rulers to act in defence of the public good — but on occasion outside the constraints of law. Liberal thought has tended to overlook the arbitrary powers of citizens and private organisations. This is due, first, to its commitment to individual liberty. But it is also due ‐more substantially — to the belief that private agents and corporations, even when not constrained by law, are none the less subject to the non‐legal sanctions and rewards imposed by the market and other aspects of civil society. Neo‐liberalism is not rendered distinctive by its promotion of arbitrary power, since this has always featured in liberal government. Neo‐liberalism is distinguished rather by its promotion of arbitrary powers across the full range of organs of governance ‐ from departments of government, through publicly and pr...