Thinking Past a Problem

Essays on the History of Ideas

Professor Preston King, Preston King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135298975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Professor King's concept of the philosophy of history leads him to offer this demonstration of the incoherence, even absurdity, of the notion that the past can have nothing to teach us - whether posed by those who argue that history is "unique" or that it is merely "contextual".

1

Introduction

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This volume brings together several essays which have mostly appeared elsewhere. They attend to a cluster of problems from divergent and overlapping angles. The treatment is not as systematic as I had wished; indeed, there have been obstacles enough to getting as far as this. But I hope that the core question is caught by the title of the book, taken from the opening essay. This invokes the embeddedness of the past in, and the sly complexity of, what we may call – too summarily and unblinkingly – ‘the present’. The concern is not to supply or to defend or to attack some particular historical account (such as may be found in the Book of Genesis or Marx or Toynbee), nor a history of ideas (as by George Sabine or Sheldon Wolin or Iain Hampsher-Monk), nor really a history of the history of ideas (despite the limited account along these lines offered in Chapter 3 and the relevant section in Chapter 11). The focus, rather, is more upon philosophies of history and, a fortiori, upon philosophies of the history of ideas. The thrust of my book The History of Ideas: An Introduction to Method (King, 1983) was to do with noting and debating the merits of key figures and theories widely recognized to constitute that book’s subject. The object here, by contrast, is to assemble only my own essays in this area, published before, in and after my book in 1983. The present collection has at least the merit of convenience, while the reader may be left to judge the true merits of the convenience.

I work from the assumption that all history is, broadly, some form of history of ideas, and that the initial problem is to identify the distinct type of idea which one’s history may be to do with. Any matter of concern to us, on the assumption that it has duration, may be approached in principle from an historical angle. The subject can be concrete, like ‘Gladstone’; it may be abstract, like ‘progress’. It can be grand and deal with the rise and fall of a vast empire (Gibbon), or with the rise and fall of entire civilizations (von der Muhl), or so grand as to extend even to the ‘History of the Concept of Time’ (Heidegger). But history equally focuses upon somewhat narrower terrain, such as serfdom in Saxony in the fourteenth century, or El Consejo supremo in Aragon under Felipe II, or Samuel Parker and the Church of England of yesteryear. I find it notoriously difficult to see what history cannot embrace: infancy, ‘prehistory’; biology, astronomy; marriage, disease, war; politics, physics, philosophy. Philosophy is axiomatically implicated in most of what we term ‘the history of ideas’, ‘the history of thought’, whether political, economic, social, scientific or other.

I take it that thinking is a form of action, as where one solves a puzzle or composes an essay or tries to defuse some larger difficulty, though it will not do to claim that action in turn necessarily involves thinking. The thinking and writing of history proceed from positing some concern or concept, answering questions regarding it, but within a clearly temporal framework, and not as Eternity. As to the scale of the enterprise, who is to say what this must be? It may be as broad or narrow as is allowed by the nature of the question, plus the evidence bearing on it. It is not tenable to suppose that history is only to do with the god of small things, with gradual or piecemeal or evolutionary transformation, nor that exploration ought only to extend to the garden and never reach for the stars. Arguably, Russia in 1917 was no less radically and suddenly transformed than was the Soviet Union in December 1991. Arguably, it was desirable for Uncle Sam to withdraw or be expelled from Vietnam more speedily than he entered.

As to change, who is entitled to insist that history be exclusively to do with this? Change is only to be accounted for in relation to that which endures. As well as change, history also supplies and depends on some account of duration. We may see this even in so simple a circumstance as where the reporter records the suspect immobility of the dead rhino, an immobility that persists from the point that Tito shoots the animal to the moment, finally, where the old Marshall sets foot on his trophy’s head. History, then, is marked as much by duration as by change, and no sense can be made of the one except in relation to the other. We have not said enough if we say that history is all about change, since history involves something more. And since history involves something more, to say it is only about change is less than accurate. To maintain that history is only about change is a selective claim. It is not the selectiveness that makes the claim false, but rather the business of passing off the selective claim ‘History is only about change’ as a comprehensive statement of the truth about the nature of history.

The historical account is a selective account. ‘Selective’ is not the same as ‘distorted’. Were that the case, then all history would be ‘distorted’. The range of claims that may be advanced about duration and alteration are infinite. The run of claims that might in theory be made could not all be uttered. An historical account, looking out upon an infinity of options, directions and minutiae, must attend to some and lay others aside. It must pick and choose. The objectivity of the undertaking, far from being undermined by selectivity, rather presupposes it. We cannot pretend from the outset to be objective, except in the knowledge of the principle which guides our selection. It is not the mixing but the matching that is the problem. One must unlock the closet in which lurks the principle that directs and governs what is being executed. So the historian, of whatever sort, must first ask: What am I about? What thread am I following? What principle, hypothesis or intuition am I exploring? The historian, fully aware that everything cannot be done, must put the question to self, with all the severity the circumstance demands: What, in sum, is my brief? A history, to be coherent, viz. rational, requires a guiding principle, value, orientation or focus, which serves as a criterion of relevance in the action of ego upon data. History, including any history of ideas, cannot avoid taking a bearing. There is always the risk of dogmatism in this. But it is not an avoidable risk; so much borders (almost) on the commonplace. What seems less banal is the insistence that this intrusion of ego – of the present, of the hypothesis, of the imagination – holds whatever the scale of the history, and whatever the balance it strikes between change–persistence, alteration–duration, and without the certainty that some particular scale or balance is safer in se than another.

There is no History as such. There is this history or that. No history covers everything, is everything. A history that assumes the contrary, loses its head; it surrenders the fundamental ground of its rationality, which is the recognition by history of its selective structure, and thus its acceptance of the need to elicit, at least to seek to elicit, the criterion by which selection (here or there, now or then) proceeds. Any history unavoidably ‘sins’ by omission. There has to be a focus on some End. Otherwise, there is no end. Focus is our means of covering the gaps: Full of presumption as focus may be, there is no forward movement without it. Ego can make out no path by fixing solely on the data underfoot, never looking to the horizon. A degree of imagination, of looking ahead, trading on instinct and the uncertainty of experience, is essential if ego is to accomplish any object. Ego is present; to grasp the past requires incorporating it into the present. Ego operates upon the past with the gloves, mask and scalpel of a present perspective. Such paraphernalia does not ‘corrupt’ the past, but opens a way into it.

One of the most important functions of the present is simply to accommodate the past. To know about the past is to know about it in the present, as a part of the present, from a present perspective; otherwise we cannot know it at all. There can be no such thing as the pure past, if ‘pure’ means untouched, ‘untainted’ by present concerns. Of course we must distinguish past from present in some way, but it is rather more like distinguishing ‘apple’ from ‘fruit’, than ‘to be’ from ‘not to be’. The distinction, in short, is nothing like so stark as some think or wish. There are distinct varieties of past and present. And most types of ‘present’ absorb some complementary type of ‘past’ (see Chapter 2). The commitment to keeping the past out of the present is based on nothing so much as a confused appreciation of the delicate logic of this interrelation.

Those who think the past is corrupted by the present tend to view the whole object of history, whether of politics or philosophy, as enabling us to escape the present, as we would measles or chickenpox. This fear of contamination is understandable, but like the panic that often overcomes drowning persons, its only effect is to make the work of rescue more difficult. This dread that the present will infect the past, as real as the problem may be, is too radical a formulation and the implicit remedy is too destructive, leaving aside the absurdity involved. What has to be refused is the very idea that ‘the present’ is the source of infection, and that the best remedy is amputation.

We may see that a change of time or place may readily enough alter the force or application of a claim whose meaning otherwise is clear and unaffected. Take the argument about the appropriate assessment of the work of a criminologist like Fred Imbau (1962) whose Criminal Interrogation and Confessions became famous as a textbook promoting ‘dodgy’ psychological techniques for securing confessions from accused persons. What Imbau promoted was clear enough; the question was whether what he promoted was morally acceptable. One latter-day argument would be that Imbau was wrong to encourage police in the interrogation process to lie (by falsely sympathizing with the motives of a suspected murderer) in order to draw the suspect out. An opposed argument would be that, in his day, Imbau was right to promote such tactics, since these supplied the police with a non-violent alternative to beating confessions out of suspects. The point, however, is that the Imbau-type case, regarding the propriety of moral assessment, is less a matter of a difference between an earlier and a later time than a matter of understanding the alternatives present in the mind of an actor at the moment that a particular course is entertained. The difference in time, in short, is subsidiary to the difference in moral circumstance, which is clearly as much a matter of outlook, setting, options or place as of time per se.

The remedy appropriate for anachronism can be woefully misconceived and unhappily mis-stated. Suppose Russell Banks (1998) supplies a lengthy Tolstoyan and highly factual novel (Cloudsplitter) that seeks to reconstruct the psychology of John Brown (who seized Harper’s Ferry in 1859 in an effort to free the slaves). Suppose Banks goes as far as the available data allows in trying to fill the inevitable gaps, but in the end, consciously or not, somehow falls back upon experience of his own father, an honest but implacable man, to make the psycho-history of Brown coherent. Criticism of Banks for anachronism will be well-judged should he conflate his experience with that of his subject in the face of available evidence which shows, or allows the inference, that Brown’s experience was quite different. But the criticism will not work if based on the automatic, dogmatic assumption that Banks’ experience, in the relevant respects, is simply and necessarily different to that of his subject. The assumption that the past is automatically distinct from the present is the key component of an encompassing particularism, and it exacerbates rather than overcomes the problem posed by anachronism.

We have come by now far enough to see that the proposal, per impossibile, that we remove ourselves from the present to enter the past is self-defeating. We should be content to think that the past is corrupted by a present perspective only if the latter violates the truth of the past. We should see, moreover, where a present perspective does violate the truth of the past, that it is not the present perspective we can be urged to shed, but rather the content we have been able to identify as ‘distorted’. We should accept, finally, that past truth is violated not only by making the past falsely identical with what is now, but also by making it falsely different from what is now. If we are alarmed by anachronism (falsely asserting an identity or continuity with the past), then we should equally be alarmed by particularism (falsely asserting a difference from the past, thus claiming an otherness that does not obtain). The chief and the distinctive feature of my analysis in what follows is a more sustained and consistent insistence upon this outcome: first, that the past is known only by incorporation into the present (Chapter 2), and second, that particularism (Chapter 4), and the contextualist variations on this (especially in Chapters 5, 7 and 8), constitute an irrelevant defence against anachronism.

It will be claimed by some that particularism and contextualism are worlds apart. But if they differ, in the way that one domestic cat differs from another, they are the same, in the way that any two cats are equally members of felis catus. Contextualism is a contemporary methodological claim that valid history is only secured via the approximately complete reconstruction of ‘the context’. The inspiration of this claim has to be that we can make no present assumptions that are valid for the past, that the past is marked by a chronic alterity, that our chief obligation, in the pursuit of what Oakeshott called ‘the historical past’, is to escape the present. This aim, to reconstruct the context of the past, is implicitly burdened by a concern to escape the anachronistic tyranny of the present. The point is not that there is no genuine problem sparking contextualism, or that it is burdened by all gross absurdity. The claim, ‘I am 20’, will at some time have been valid, but no longer is, given the march of time. The truth of the claim may depend upon who says it and when. It may even be true that there is no claim whose sense is not somehow affected by its context. But assuming this is so, it would only mean that in the pursuit of truth we are always inevitably operating ‘contextually’, in the way that Molire’s hero is amazed by the recognition that he has always been speaking prose. It does not mean that one will or can know better by resolving to unravel ‘the context’. In short, historical contextualism supplies a strikingly inadequate solution to the problem of distinguishing true from false and better from worse in history.

First, the contextualist project makes no sense except on the assumption that the past is automatically and necessarily different from the present, or else why bother exhaustively to reconstitute it, as contextualism requires? Second, one cannot in any event reconstruct the context of the past except by entry through the portals of the present, raising the question how it would be possible to guarantee that reconstituting (contextualizing) the past was not just another form of inference from the present. If the context of the past hinges upon the perspective of the present, how, if at all, may we exclude the possibility that the one is not the creature of the other? Third, the past, even the very narrowest tranche we seek to reconstitute, can never be completely reconstituted, so that the bald recommendation that we contextualize it always shuffles between ambiguity and impossibility. My concern, accordingly, is less to impose upon the historian an obligation of some particular stripe, but more to remove some of the false obstructions that have been trundled into place by others. I do not argue for the historian’s liberty in any terribly abstract way, but only for the removal of that particular type of repressive constraint that requires the avoidance of anything grand, of any ambition, of any conjecture that chances to surmount conformity and stone-walling.

For good or ill, some of these reflections on history carry over into the analysis of ideology. The notion of ideology is in large part one summary way of attending to history. Where we speak of anarchism or socialism or liberalism or capitalism, all viewed as ideologies, what we face are large swathes of history made coherent, not always persuasively, by reference to some given rubric. These notions are so large as historical constructs, and contain so many divergent lines, philosophically speaking, that I am tempted to keep a certain distance from them. This is only to say that in many histories, the project being executed wavers precisely because the rubric – the theme or principle – is not precisely or consistently articulated. Ideologies persist as forms of historical engagement all the same, and are an important part of the repertoire, for better and worse, of what we call ‘the history of ideas’.

I have, like Napoleon, Marx and Oakeshott, been inclined to portray ‘ideology’ as negative. But by ‘negative’, I do not mean that histories of what may be called ‘ideologies’ cannot be written or should not be written or that there is no significant difference between them in quality. Anthony Arblaster, Barbara Goodwin, Andrew Heywood and Andrew Vincent, are some of those who execute this sort of historical task, even when they do not refer to what they are doing as history, and they do it well enough. In saying that I view ideologies as ‘negative’, nor do I mean that they are simply imprecise, fuzzy overviews of divergent developments which are educationally and mnemonically valuable, especially to the uninitiated. Inasfar as they are so, that is just a good reason for viewing them as the starting point, not the repudiation, of serious argument.

My view of ideology as negative starts sympathetically from much the same premise as does Oakeshott’s, which was reason enough for my essay on ideology (reprinted here as Chapter 11) to appear originally in the Oakeshott Festschrift (King and Parekh, 1968). If my essay on ideology started from Oakeshott’s problem, it diverged somewhat in attempting to get round it; for Oakeshott’s orientation was conservative, my own, socialist. As for the problem itself, it reflects a connection between the parallel challenges of historical reconstruction and moral direction. And I think that Oakeshott’s formulation of the difficulty has been distinctly undervalued.

First, Oakeshott’s concern to rescue history from the obsessions of the present is clearly inspired by a commitment to get the account of the past right; if his solution does not work, the objective remains admirable. Second, Oakeshott’s antipathy to what he calls ‘rationalism’ is plainly inspired by the belief that we can never say altogether self-consciously what the appropriate moral principles are by which we should be guided; if he risks in this falling into subjectivism, he has still put his finger on the key social aporia of modernity. As Oakeshott (1962) writes:

Every admirable ideal has its opposite, no less admirable. Liberty or order, justice or charity, spontaneity or deliberateness, principle or circumstance, self or others, these are … always confronting us, making us see double by directing our attention away to abstract extremes, none of which is wholly desirable (p. 69).

I do not see that this problem has been taken nearly seriously enough by figures like Rawls, Nozick, Barry, Pettit and many others, especially in relation to the arid revival of contractualism in the 1960s.

I believed then that Oakeshott had a good grip on the problem, but an inadequate solution to it. The reason given by Oakeshott for objecting to ideology is that it ‘abbreviates’ the fullness of the historical tradition, and that it is the abbreviati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Thinking Past a Problem
• 3. The Twentieth Century: A History of the History of Ideas
• 4. Michael Oakeshott and Historical Particularism
• 5. Skinner: The Theory of Context and the Case of Hobbes
• 6. Hobbes: Texts and Contexts
• 7. Historical Contextualism: The New Historicism?
• 8. Historical Contextualism Revisited
• 9. Alasdair Maclntyre: Rationalism and Tradition
• 10. History via Hypothesis
• 11. An Ideological Fallacy
• 12. Ideology as Politics
• List of Journal Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index