In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

T W E L V E Conclusion: Lineage and Affinities EVEN THEINITIALLY UNCONVINCED READER should be able to concede by now that Althusius was an important political theorist in his time, and that his theory belongs to a countertradition within Western political thought, at least when it is held against the dominant models of state and society that have developed over the course of the past 350 years. Minimally, it can therefore be argued that studying Althusius provides a better understanding of the transitional period in which he lived and wrote, and in particular of the kinds of alternatives in theory and practice that still seemed possible at the beginning of the modern age. To claim, and demonstrate, however, that there is in Althusius' political theory a timeless quality reaching beyond the past 350 years and connecting , in a relevant way, with post-Westphalian, postmodern, or simply forward-looking and innovativestrands of current political thought, is a much more problematic undertaking to which this concluding chapter is dedicated nevertheless. Its general purpose is not to suggest that the theories and analytical models sampled and surveyed below cannot be properly understood individually without reference to their Althusian lineage or affinities. Instead, what is suggested is that precisely because of lineage and affinities , these theories can be better appreciated as a body of political thought belonging to a common intellectual (counter)tradition. Moreover, their innovative potential as well as their limitations can be further explored by the comparison to a kindred spirit and mind across time. Relevance, in other words, is mainly claimed by the suggestion of a number of potentially fruitful and interesting research questions arising from what might be called associative thinking. Three types of criticisms are usually brought forward against such an undertaking. The first has to do with the everything/nothing-new dichotomy already referred to in the introduction.1 The relevance of the history of political thought is denied, on the one hand, because social evolution in theory and practice is seen as a sequence of radical transformations that simply do not allow meaningful comparisons across 1 Seechapter 1, footnote 30. 197 198 EARLY MODERN CONCEPTS FOR A LATE MODERN WORLD time. It is likewise denied, on the other hand, when history is understood as a sequence of only circumstantially variegated repetition. If Althusius really develops a concept of federalismakin to modern federal theory, for instance, then why not deal with that theory right away and without detours into the past?2 Both these arguments are not without merit because they remind the ardent student of the history of political thought that there are obvious limits to comparisons across time, and especially so with regard to questions about who said what first, etc. However, there are also important arguments that can be held against this type of criticism. One can be cautiously formulated as a suspicion that relevance might more typically be denied to what has been called a countertradition in the history of political thought. There seems to be less of a problem in acknowledging that, say, Plato, Hobbes, or Rousseau still form an intellectually instructive part of Western political thought than in admitting that, say,Althusius, Proudhon, or Kropotkin can still provide meaningful information about an alternative tradition and vision of state and society. Another and related argument is that the everything/nothing-new dichotomy can be overcome by making use of the history of political thought as a heuristic tool of "imitation and tradition."3 Theories of the past in this sense do not provide ready blueprints for the explanation of the present world, nor for alternative constructions. Instead, they can be instructive as a reservoir of ideas allowing for a comparative exploration of similar and analogous positions in theory and practice across time. In the preceding chapters, the political theory of Althusius has already been compared to some modern concepts such as community, subsidiarity, and federalism in this sense. In this chapter, the comparative effort will be extended to various strands of current political thought, albeit not in systematic fashion—that would require another book—but as a cursory sampling meant to invite further exploration. The second criticism has to do with the macro-historical assumption underlying this book: that the political theory of Althusius,written at the very beginning of the modern age of state and society, and opposed to some of the most cherished central concepts of that age, may be of particular relevance precisely now, when the "incredulity" toward those...

Share