To say this is not to claim that political theorists from another time and place have nothing to say to our own. There is no inverse relation between historical contextualization and ‘relevance’. On the contrary, historical contextualization is an essential condition for learning from the ‘classics’, not simply because it allows a better understanding of a thinker’s meaning and intention, but also because it is in the context of history that theory emerges from the realm of pure abstraction and enters the world of human practice and social interaction.
There are, of course, commonalities of experience we share with our predecessors just by virtue of being human, and there are innumerable practices learned by humanity over the centuries in which we engage as our ancestors did. These common experiences mean that much of what great thinkers of the past have to say is readily accessible to us. But if the classics of political theory are to yield fruitful lessons, it is not enough to acknowledge these commonalities of human and historical experience or to mine the classics for certain abstract universal principles. To historicize is to humanize, and to detach ideas from their own material and practical setting is to lose our points of human contact with them.
There is a way, all too common, of studying the history of political theory which detaches it from the urgent human issues to which it is addressed. To think about the politics in political theory is, at the very least, to consider and make judgments about what it would mean to translate particular principles into actual social relationships and political arrangements. If one of the functions of political theory is to sharpen our perceptions and conceptual instruments for thinking about politics in our own time and place, that purpose is defeated by emptying historical political theories of their own political meaning.
Some years ago, for instance, I encountered an argument about Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, which seemed to me to illustrate the shortcomings of an ahistorical approach.14 We should not, the argument went, treat the theory of natural slavery as a comment on a historically actual social condition, the relation between slaves and masters as it existed in the ancient world, because to do so is to deprive it of any significance beyond the socio-economic circumstances of its own time and place. Instead, we should recognize it as a philosophical metaphor for the universal human condition in the abstract. Yet to deny that Aristotle was defending a real social practice, the enslavement of real human beings, or to suggest that we have more to learn about the human condition by refusing to confront his theory of slavery in its concrete historical meaning, seems a peculiar way of sensitizing us to the realities of social life and politics, or indeed the human condition, in our own time or any other.
There is also another way in which the contextual analysis of political theory can illuminate our own historical moment. If we abstract a political theory from its historical context, we in effect assimilate it to our own. Understanding a theory historically allows us to look at our own historical condition from a critical distance, from the vantage point of other times and other ideas. It also allows us to observe how certain assumptions, which we may now accept uncritically, came into being and how they were challenged in their formative years. Reading political theory in this way, we may be less tempted to take for granted the dominant ideas and assumptions of our own time and place.
This benefit may not be so readily available to contextual approaches in which historical processes are replaced by disconnected episodes and traditions of discourse. The Cambridge mode of contextualization encourages us to believe that the old political thinkers have little to say in our own time and place. It invites us to think that there is nothing to learn from them, because their historical experiences have no apparent connection to our own. To discover what there is to learn from the history of political theory requires us to place ourselves on the continuum of history, where we are joined to our predecessors not only by the continuities we share but by the processes of change that intervene between us, bringing us from there to here.
The intention of this study, then, is not only to illuminate some classic texts and the conditions in which they were created but also to explain by example a distinctive approach to contextual interpretation. Its subject matter will be not only texts, nor discursive paradigms, but the social relations that made them possible and posed the particular questions addressed by political theorists. This kind of contextual reading also requires us to do something more than follow the line of descent from one political thinker to the next. It invites us to explore how certain fundamental social relations set the parameters of human creativity, not only in political theory but in other modes of discourse that form part of the historical setting and the cultural climate within which political theories emerged – such as, say, Greek tragedy, the Roman law or Christian theology.
While I try to strike a balance between contextual analysis and interpretation of the major texts, some readers may think that this way of proceeding places too much emphasis on grand structural themes at the expense of a more exhaustive textual reading. But the approach being proposed in this book is best understood not as in any way excluding or slighting close textual analysis but, on the contrary, as a way of shedding light on texts, which others can put to the test by more minute and detailed reading.
The Origin of Political Theory
Scholars have offered various explanations for the emergence of political theory in ancient Greece. There will be more in the next chapter about the specific historical conditions that produced, especially in Athens, the kind of confidence in human agency that is a necessary condition of political theory. In this chapter, we shall confine ourselves to the general conditions that marked the Greeks out from other ancient civilizations and set the agenda for political theory.
The most vital factor undoubtedly was the development, perhaps by the late eighth century BC, of the unique Greek state, the polis, which sometimes evolved into self-governing democracies, as in Athens from the early fifth to the late fourth century. This type of state differed sharply from the large imperial states that characterized other ‘high’ civilizations, and from states that preceded the polis in Greece, the Minoan and Mycenean kingdoms. In place of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus, the polis was characterized by a fairly simple state administration (if we can even call it a ‘state’ at all) and a self-governing civic community, in which the principal political relations were not between rulers and subjects but among citizens – whether the citizen body was more inclusive, as in Athenian democracy, or less so, as in Sparta or the city-states of Crete. Politics, in the sense we have come to understand the word, implying contestation and debate among diverse interests, replaced rule or administration as the principal object of political discourse. These factors were, of course, more prominent in democracies, and Athens in particular, than in the oligarchic polis.
It is also significant that by the end of the fifth century, Greece was becoming a literate culture, in unprecedented ways and to an unprecedented degree. Although we should not overestimate its extent, a kind of popular literacy, especially in the democracy, replaced what some scholars have called craft literacy, in which reading and writing were specialized skills practised only, or largely, by professionals or scribes. What happened in Greece, and especially in Athens, has been described as the democratization of writing.
Popular rule, which required widespread and searching discussion of pressing social and political issues, and which provided new opportunities for political leadership and influence, when coupled with economic prosperity, brought an increasing demand for schooling and teaching. An economically vital, democratic and relatively free culture with a growing means of written expression