Alan Ryan on the Majesty of the History of Political Thought: A Review Essay

To the uninitiated, the ocean that is the history of political thought can be difficult, if not impossible, to wade into. The most straightforward explanation for this is that the texts that serve as the traditional canon, the core exemplars of political theorizing like Aristotle's Politics, Hobbes's Leviathan and Mill's On Liberty, which one will find on virtually every introductory syllabus on the subject, are quite often long, dense, complicated, and jargon-laden. Even when they are mercifully short, they are still far from the kind of books that most of us wish to see at an airport bookshop. Of course, in this respect, political philosophy is little different from other academic disciplines. Scholarly journals that focus on experimental physics, econometrics, or competing interpretations of Shakespeare, for example, are not typically known for their accessibility.

Yet, as Alan Ryan makes clear in his magisterial survey On Politics, while the dilemmas, paradoxes, and conundrums that political philosophy presents us with may often be abstract and even obtuse, they are also of deep and abiding relevance, not merely for trained specialists, but for ordinary citizens as well. This is because the central animating questions of political theory (e.g., what is justice? what is freedom? how do we best govern ourselves?) are fundamental, not only in the sense that they are of crucial import in helping us to think about how we should order our lives both as individuals and as members of a collective, but also because at their core they can be accessed and answered by all socialized humans. In this respect, political theory is best understood as a deeply democratic enterprise. While our ideas about justice, freedom, and political legitimacy may be inchoate, underspecified, and even contradictory, they are still always present (even if sometimes they retreat beneath the surface) in the political discourse of ordinary citizens.

However, even though these questions are in principle accessible to all of us, most of us do not bother to continue to ask them. If we think about them at all, we tend to be content to accept whatever passes as conventional wisdom concerning, for example, the nature of politics, the legitimacy of the state, or the definition of democracy. As Ryan nicely points out with respect to the latter, all too often we simply equate democracy with whatever form of government we happen to possess. As this demonstrates, political concepts have the tendency to become viewed as sociological and empirical descriptions of the world rather than the normatively charged and highly contestable assertions that they, in fact, are. Political theory becomes political science.

Intellectual laziness may be part of the story here. Most of us have better things to do than concern ourselves with such heady matters. But, this is not the whole story. Rather, as the ancient proverb suggests, custom is too easily interpreted as a second nature. We accept the political universe we happen to inhabit because we find it difficult to imagine other possibilities. We neglect to consider that the very political concepts we so heavily rely upon do not fall from the sky like manna, but rather have intriguing, meandering, and contingent histories and genealogies all their own.

Even those of us who do have an appreciation for this fact will likely find it difficult to navigate and contextualize historically distinct visions of politics because of the inherent challenge of seeing the world with lenses from radically different times and places. For example, without a significant amount of background knowledge of Greek or Italian political culture and institutions, can one really understand what Aristotle or Machiavelli is driving at in their classic texts? The task is made even more complicated by the fact that political philosophers have, almost since the very beginning, positioned themselves in a self-conscious dialogue and debate with the thinkers who preceded them. In order to understand Rousseau's conception of the state of nature, it is crucial to understand his rejection of Hobbes's interpretation of...