Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen

1. From Fortune to Feedback: Contingency and the Birth of Modern Political Science

Chapter 1 From Fortune to Feedback Contingency and the Birth of Modern Political Science David Wootton Events, dear boy, events. —Harold Macmillan when asked what might prevent his government achieving its objectives Hydraulic Engineering: Machiavelli and Naudé1 This chapter is about a curiously elusive subject: the idea of contingency in early modern thought. It is not that the subject does not exist, for the concept of contingency was clearly understood. But early modern thinkers , with a few striking exceptions, found it almost impossible to focus on contingency: for most authors it was at best something glimpsed at the periphery of their vision, a liminal concept that represented the point where knowledge inevitably shaded into ignorance. In 1623 Sir Edward Digby wrote, “The eyes of human knowledge cannot see beyond its [human knowledge’s] horizon; it cannot ascertain future contingents.”2 In 1625 Francis Bacon wrote, “But it is not good to look too long upon these turning wheels of vicissitude, lest we become giddy.” The world of contingency was thus also the world of the unpredictable and the disorderly. John Donne, in a sermon of 1616, spoke of being “Exposed to the disposition of the tyde, to the rage of the winde, to the wantonness of the eddy, and to innumerable contingencies”; over three centuries later Macmillan was to find himself similarly at the mercy of events. The problem early modern thinkers had with the contingent was not just that they saw it as shapeless, formless, disorderly, to be compared to a 21 Shapiro_pp019-096 7/17/07 3:10 PM Page 21 wind or an eddy. For scholastic philosophers and for Cartesians all knowledge was knowledge of things which were necessarily true (in the case of the scholastics, capable of being expressed in the form of a syllogism). By definition, the contingent thus lay outside the territory of the truly knowable, in a world where one had to make do with prudence, at best, or else with opinion: for Abraham Fraunce, writing in 1588, there were necessary reasons, “whereof cometh science,” and contingent reasons, “whence cometh opinion.” To enter the world of the contingent was to enter the world of homespun wisdom, of the maxim and the adage: a stitch in time saves nine, forewarned is forearmed, buyer beware. It was also to enter the world of human agency: “As these impediments are contingent,” wrote William Petty in Political Arithmetick (1687), “so also are they removeable.” This brings us to a third order of difficulty. For orthodox early modern Christians, God’s omniscience meant that He had perfect foreknowledge of all future events. The future, seen from God’s point of view, was never contingent but always necessary. As Robert Burton put it in the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), “Columbus did not find out America by chance, but God directed him . . . it was contingent to him, but necessary to God.” A particular problem within the general territory of foreknowledge was presented by the question of freedom of the will. Some thinkers defined the contingent as everything that was not determined in advance, as Thomas Hobbes did: “By contingents, I understand all things which may be done and may not be done, may happen or may not happen, by reason of the indetermination or accidental concurrence of the causes.” But others defined the contingent as specifically that territory of uncertainty that was associated with freedom of choice and voluntary action. Thus for John Salkeld (1613) the contingent was synonymous with that which is “dependent of man’s will.” For these authors the whole territory of the unknowable was made up of the contingent together with the accidental, which consisted of unpredictable events, such as an ax head flying off its shaft and killing a passer-by. Theologians divided into two groups. The Augustinians (Jansenists, Calvinists) denied that there was such a thing as free will. Jonathan Edwards , in 1754, described it as “This contingency, this efficient nothing, this effectual no-Cause.” For them, contingency was either an illusion or, at best, a purely subjective experience, a sense of not being compelled by any external agent. The will was in fact determined and enslaved, and thus there was nothing inherently unpredictable about human action. Their opponents (Jesuits, Arminians, Socinians) argued that human beings had 22 d av i d w o o t t o n Shapiro_pp019-096 7/17/07 3:10 PM Page 22 real freedom...