On Politics and History. A discussion with Quentin Skinner

ON POLITICS AND HISTORY: A DISCUSSION WITH QUENTIN SKINNER Quentin Skinner is one of the leading authorities in the field of the intellectual history and the history of political thought. After a prolific academic career at Cambridge University, which culminated in his appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History, he moved to Queen Mary, University of London where he was appointed the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities. Quentin Skinner is regarded as one of the principal representatives of what has become known as the ‘Cambridge School’ and he has carried out important studies in Early Modern political philosophy, chiefly on Hobbes and Machiavelli, liberty and the modern state. Skinner's current research is concerned with two main themes. He continues to write about the theory of the state; he recently coedited Sovereignty in Fragments and edited Families and States in Western Europe. Currently he is co-directing a network which brings together the work of the world’s leading scholars on the history and theory of popular sovereignty. His other current project centers on the uses of classical rhetoric in the Renaissance. Having considered the relations between rhetoric and the philosophy of the period in his Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), he is now examining the uses of rhetoric in early-modern drama, focusing Shakespeare's early Jacobean plays. Preliminary versions of these findings have been delivered as the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford (2011) and the Clark Lectures at Cambridge (2012), and he is now completing a book on this topic for Oxford University Press. The incentive for the discussion which follows is twofold. First, it stems from our realisation of the commonalities of prevailing political vocabulary in countries with great contextual differences, 8! Intellectual History and Political Thought namely Greece and Mexico. This transnational frame of reference is supplemented, secondly, by an increasing awareness of the common methodological challenges in the practice of intellectual history in fields so diverse as the study of early modern Latin American and twentieth-century European thought. The hospitable academic environment of Queen Mary, University of London, facilitated the preparation for this interview, which covers a vast array of themes regarding the method and practice of intellectual history. Beginning with a discussion of Skinner’s own involvement in the development and evolution of the history of political thought, we also touch on his contributions to the study of the key concepts of liberty and the state. Finally, the interview considers the merit of the study of the history of political thought for the analysis of current political debates in a moment of ‘crisis’ within the western state and in the broader field of international relations as testified by the coinage of the word ‘Arab Spring’ at a time of a prolonged ‘European Winter’. The interview was conducted in two sessions in July 2011 at Quentin Skinner’s home in London. It has been translated in Greek and Spanish and it will be published shortly in the Greek Journal Sygxrona Themata and the Mexican Journal Signos filosóficos. We wish to express our deep gratitude to Quentin Skinner and the editors of the Journal of Intellectual History and Political Thought. Georgios Giannakopoulos Queen Mary, University of London Francisco Quijano Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México On Politics and History 9 When asked to define your intellectual endeavours you usually refer to yourself as an ‘historian of moral philosophy’ and as an ‘historian of political thought’. Do you see any difference between these and, possibly, other terms you have used over the years? More generally, what you take your engagement with the past to be? I think these changes of terminology reflect my polemical intentions at different times. They also reflect changes in the configuration of the disciplines themselves during my lifetime. When I started out I would have described myself as an historian of political thought, but there is a purely parochial explanation for that choice. I was brought up in the University of Cambridge and from an early age I was teaching there. One of the undergraduate papers I taught was called ‘The history of political thought’. It was understood in the university that there would be people whose expertise was in that subject and in the generation before me there were some very distinguished examples. Peter Laslett would be one and John Pocock would be another. So the university simply thought of the history of political thought as a kind of history, and I was happy to endorse that view. I subsequently came to feel, especially when I was working on the Renaissance, that there is no interesting distinction to be made between moral philosophy and political philosophy. If you study Renaissance political philosophy you are usually studying the theory of the virtues. But that might just as easily be called a study of moral philosophy and I tended then to speak of myself in those terms, as you say. Nowadays, I would be more inclined to stress the differences, and in any case I prefer not to use either of these terms. I now tend to talk about myself as an intellectual historian. That’s what I mean by saying that my choices partly reflect a configuration and a re-configuration of the disciplines. The study of intellectual history – meaning simply the study of the ideas we encounter in the past – has been growing greatly in importance and in standing in the past generation. Especially after the decline of Marxist social 10! Intellectual History and Political Thought and economic history a lot of historians rebranded themselves as cultural historians and amongst those historians a number were writing what I would call intellectual history. I suppose that’s how I would now want to talk about myself if I were asked. Speaking of my engagement with these questions, as you also do, I would like to disavow the title of the history of ideas. It’s true that I made use of that terminology in some of my publications in the 1960s, but that was intended rather ironically. At that time if you talked about the history of ideas you usually identified yourself as someone who believed in what Arthur Lovejoy had called ‘unit ideas’ and were looking for these throughout the history of western culture. Of course that was as far from the approach I wanted to commend as possible. I have always wanted to say, and I do say in the essay that I published under the title ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, that we should never think of ourselves as studying ideas but always the uses of those ideas in polemical engagements and political argument.1 You have insisted that historians ought to be always prepared to ask themselves what is the point or purpose of their historical studies and what is supposed to be the practical use, here and now, of their studies of the past. How do you address these questions in your own research? My view about what I have rather grandly called ‘practical purposes’ arises from the fact that, if you engage in a critique of our moral and political concepts, if you produce a philosophical criticism of how they are understood and implemented, you will always be engaged in the task of reconsidering the legitimacy of particular social and political arrangements at the same time. I !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The essay ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ was first published in the Journal History and Theory in 1969. An edited version of the essay was later published in Quentin Skinner 2002, pp. 57-90. On Politics and History 11 strongly disagree with the Wittgenstinian view that philosophy leaves everything as it is. As Alastair MacIntyre once nicely put it ‘philosophy leaves everything as it is except for concepts’.2 Philosophy, as I practise it, is the study of the critique of concepts. If you criticise our understanding of a concept such as freedom and you challenge the account we give of the range of reference of the corresponding term, you are also asking whether certain arrangements, which are now held to be free arrangements, are perhaps not free after all. If you can persuade people of the usefulness of your rival analysis you will have persuaded them to see their social world differently. And if they see their social world differently, they may be inclined to think that features which they had thought of as legitimate are not legitimate after all, or conversely. To give an example of how this could be practical, my friend and colleague Philip Pettit has had a very extraordinary relationship with the president of Spain, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. President Zapatero read Philip’s work on republicanism when it was first published in 1997.3 When Zapatero became president, he summoned Philip to Spain to talk to his cabinet about what institutions would have to change, granted that they accepted his understanding of freedom as absence of domination rather than absence of interference. Philip was invited to give them a kind of blueprint for what arrangements would be delegitimised by accepting that understanding of a key concept in our political lives. The extraordinary thing was the extent to which the social revolution that Zapatero put through was predicated on that way of thinking about freedom and citizenship. So there is a very practical !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 MacIntyre 1967, pp. 2-3. Pettit 1997. Regarding Zapatero’s relationship with Petit see Martí and Pettit 2010. 3 12! Intellectual History and Political Thought instance about how a philosophical critique helped to generate a program of reform. In the context of the current ‘crisis’ in the Humanities and the university as the site par excellence for the pursuit of knowledge and critical thinking, you have maintained that humanistic research can (and should) address the most ‘exacting’ and ‘philistine’ standards of ‘usefulness’. What exactly do you mean by this? Is this elucidation of the practical use of some humanistic disciplines the only way to defend the field of humanistic research as a whole? How are the Humanities to be defended more effectively in our current predicament? These are very urgent questions and I am glad to have a chance to say something about them. I am conscious that if I do try to say anything about these very large issues in a brief compass it will sound very much like a string of clichés. But let me first point out that in answering your previous question I’ve tried to say something about how the sort of study that I am interested in can be a kind of practical subject. It is not easy for it to be so, and I think that Philip Pettit’s achievement is remarkable, but it can be so, as the example shows. Of course, that cannot be the sole or even the principal reason for engaging in humanistic research. So what should be our reasons for engaging in this kind of research at this time of crisis? I think myself – although as I’ve confessed I’m about to produce a cliché – that we need the humanities if we are going to feel at home in our own culture. I have two things in mind when I make that point. One is that in Europe, as in any of the great cultures, we have inherited an extraordinarily rich and complicated tradition of painting and of architecture, as well as of literature and philosophy. We need, as part of being at home in our world, to appreciate those traditions, so that we don’t simply go around with our eyes, as it were, closed to the cultural achievements by which we are surrounded. Then we need people within our culture who understand in detail this On Politics and History 13 heritage of painting and architecture as much as religion and philosophy, and can explain this heritage to us and keep it alive. My second point is that our relationship to these traditions is not an inert one. I am not saying that we just need a few guidebooks to help us to find our way around Istanbul or Rome or any of the other great cultural centres of Europe. We also need to learn more about these cultures, to improve our understanding. Thus we need not merely an appreciation of humanistic study, but we need research. So, for example, if you consider the place of music in our culture, it’s been a feature of contemporary musicology that large areas of early modern music that were barely understood even two generations ago have become central to our cultural selfunderstanding. This has only happened because scholars have gone into libraries and found the missing operas of Vivaldi, reconstructed the works of Monteverdi, found out how Handel’s operas were actually performed. None of this was known when I was a young man. But if you had gone to the Promenade Concerts in London last year, you would have heard Monteverdi’s ‘Vespers’ filling the largest concert hall in England. The humanities should not be thought of as merely custodians of our existing knowledge of our culture. They are means to deepen and extend our knowledge of it all the time. You have consistently been critical of an ‘antiquarian’ approach to history, that is, the view that the knowledge of the past is worth having ‘for its own sake’. By contrast, you have admitted that wider moral and political motivations affect your selection of research subjects. Do these motivations also influence the way you treat those subjects and your overall approach towards historical studies? Thank you. That could sound a rather hostile question. I like very much the distinction you make between the motivation for the selection of subjects and the way in which we then treat them. Let me begin by saying that I do think, although this is an unpopular 14! Intellectual History and Political Thought thing to say within my profession, that the professionalization of the study of history and the large numbers of people who are now professional historians have brought a danger: it can seem enough to engage in debates that have simply been thrown up within the discipline, so that people don’t ask themselves, because they do not have to ask themselves, whether these debates are of any wider importance. If there is some debate internal to some particular discipline this will always excite the journals and you can always publish work that simply picks up and questions the terms of those debates. Sometimes this is valuable, but it carries the danger that we stop talking to anyone except each other. To address your point more directly, I think, of course, that we ought to bring to bear our own values when we select the subjects that we study. It would be very odd if we brought to bear somebody else’s values! There is a general point that needs to be brought out here, which is a kind of idealism (in the philosophical sense) about history that I’ve come to espouse. History is not out there awaiting us. We select the topics for investigation. We select the questions. We select the means of approaching and dealing with the questions we select. We only start looking at the evidence once we’ve made all those choices. There is nothing out there for us to patiently reacquaint ourselves with. The entire project is an invention in the sense that we make all the decisions about what counts as history. So it is inevitably going to be an expression of our values. It couldn’t be anything else. To move on to your other point, perhaps it is inevitable, as a result, that our values also affect or, I would want to say, contaminate the way in which those subjects then get treated. Perhaps that too is inevitable. If you look at the history of historical writing it certainly looks inevitable. The extent to which the history of the writing of my own country’s history has served political purposes is very obvious. Much of early modern historical writing was frankly ideological, in the sense that it was designed to uphold On Politics and History 15 particular positions that were in political contestation in the society at the time. Maybe we are always doing something like that, but if we are, we had better be self–conscious about it. And I hope that we are not simply doing that. Once we’ve selected our topic and the questions we want to ask about it, we should do our best to treat those questions in their own terms, that is to say, in the terms of the society for which they were originally questions. If we don’t, then our history simply becomes a mirror in which to admire ourselves. I would like to end my answer to this question by going back to something I said at the beginning. When I say that there is a danger that historians just talk to each other and can get caught up in debates that are of not very wide interest, I’m not pleading for something that has become very fashionable in Anglophone academic culture, namely that historians should basically write for a broad popular audience. I do not believe that at all. I believe that historians should be trying so far as possible to produce new knowledge by way of doing original research. After all, the popular history that fills our television screens and airport bookstores is entirely dependent upon that kind of research and could not exist without it. I also think that the distinction commonly drawn between works of professional history that nobody reads and works of popular history that are broadly read is itself a false dichotomy. If you write history that people find of any interest, it is extraordinary how widely translated and read it is. I am not one of those whose works are particularly widely read, but certainly my research is available in some two dozen languages and one of my books has sold over 100,000 copies. I say that not in a spirit of boastfulness but to question the alleged distinction between academic history, which is all I ever try to write, and popular history, which is supposed to be the only kind of history which is widely read. 16! Intellectual History and Political Thought You have been considered as one of the foremost ‘representatives’ of the so-called ‘Cambridge School of History’. At the same time, you have expressed your doubts about the very existence of such a thing as the ‘Cambridge School’ in the most formal sense of the term. Is there any way, institutional or methodological, in which the idea of a ‘School’ may be sustained? If there is any way in which the idea of a school may be sustained, it can only be at the methodological level. I would say that there is a basic idea, which has come to be associated with a number of scholars who have worked at some point at the University of Cambridge, which might be held to isolate a ‘Cambridge School’. The idea is that philosophy is not a subject that can be defined by its attention to certain questions which are held to be definitive of philosophy, and to which philosophers have offered different answers. Rather, philosophy should be seen as a subject in which the questions, as well as the answers, change all the time, and in which the project is to try to find out what specific questions seemed of interest at different periods in the history of philosophy. If you think of people of the past generation whose names were associated with the ‘Cambridge School’, it was certainly this approach that they adopted. Here I think of two names that I have cited already: Peter Laslett and John Pocock. There is no doubt that people of my generation – John Dunn being the most important – who picked up this banner and waved it, and quite rightly in my view, were saying something similar. However, not everyone at Cambridge agreed with us and even some of those who did agree were relatively unreflective about what they were doing. John Pocock was always very methodologically self-conscious. Peter Lasslett was not. He simply got on with it somewhat in the idiom I have described, but I do not think he ever theorised it and he was not someone who was interested in metahistorical or philosophical questions – at least in print – in the way that John Pocock and later John Dunn so conspicuously were. On Politics and History 17 Furthermore, these commitments cannot be used to isolate something called the ‘Cambridge School’. For one thing, the philosopher who, in the Anglophone tradition, would be most of all associated with the tenets I have laid out would be R. G. Collingwood, who was after all a professor of philosophy at Oxford, not at Cambridge. Moreover, Collingwood himself was tremendously indebted to an idealist philosophical school mainly stemming from Italy. His hero was clearly Benedetto Croce. If there is a ‘Cambridge School’, it is not exclusive to Cambridge. You have repeatedly taken on the task of recounting, as it were, your own involvement in the intellectual foundations of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’. You have also stressed the fact that your concern in the sixties was to challenge other dominant ahistorical or reductive modes of historical inquiry. Looking retrospectively through past and more recent debates facilitated by your historical and more theoretical studies, which do you take to be the main challenges faced today by this particular mode of historical thinking? There are several challenges that this way of thinking faces and they are serious challenges, but I do not think that they are intellectually serious challenges. There are three that anyone who practices intellectual history regularly encounters. The first, especially common in the United States, is that this kind of historical thinking is objectionably elitist, because it studies particular texts of a high degree of complexity which were never widely studied and have generally been poorly understood. The objection presents itself as democratic. We are told that we should instead be studying the lives and the attitudes of ordinary people in the past. It’s true that under that banner some very important social history has been written in the past generation. But there is a danger of condescension here. My own experience is that many students really enjoy the challenge of difficult philosophical ideas and would feel patronised if they were told that theirs is a merely elitist interest. I think we must be 18! Intellectual History and Political Thought careful not to discourage students who wish to study philosophical ideas with spurious arguments about their alleged unimportance because they were never important to large numbers of people. If you think about that position, it reduces to the claim that philosophies are only important if they are popular. But surely nobody believes that. The second challenge that anyone writing this kind of history faces comes from postmodern cultural criticism. We are regularly told that this kind of historical study cannot really be done. It is an intellectual error, it is said, to suppose that you can ever recover the questions that people were asking in the past, or the intentions embodied in their works. I myself think that this criticism has something very interesting to tell us and I have benefited from it greatly. If anyone ever supposed that the meanings we impute to the texts we study have to be the meanings that were intended by their authors, then, of course, that is a serious mistake. There are many meanings in texts which were unintended by their authors but which are, nevertheless, meanings of those texts. So we should certainly focus on texts rather than intentions and no doubt we should revel in the forms of ambiguity that it has been the main achievement of postmodern cultural criticism to highlight. However, there is a danger of making a serious mistake here, and a number of postmodern cultural critics have undoubtedly made it. The mistake is to suppose that this renders illegitimate all discussions about intentionality. If you study the kind of history I study, the questions about intentionality that interest you are not questions about the relation of intention to meaning. They are questions about the intentions with which certain arguments were put forward, the intentions embodied in texts. Now, it’s often objected that these are irrecoverable because intentions are mental entities. They are in people’s heads, it is objected, and how could you possibly hope to get into the heads of long dead authors? But that’s a large mistake. These sorts of intentions are not in anyone’s On Politics and History 19 head. They are entirely in the public arena. The way to decode the intentions with which any text is written – the intentions embodied in the text – is to compare it with other texts and see what each text is doing, what kind of intervention it may be said to constitute. The third criticism that you come across is, I think, lamentable, but my students encounter it a lot in departments of history. It is that intellectual history involves only the study of texts and so is not real history. Real history, we are told, is about people, about institutions, and about how they interact with each other. That criticism we face all the time but I cannot say that it seems to me intellectually of any interest whatsoever. All it does is to re-impose a traditional notion of what should count as history and use that conception to exclude intellectual history. This is not an argument at all; it is merely the expression of a prejudice. You have insisted on the value of tracing the genealogies of concepts for the study of the history of political thought. What is more, one of your recent accounts has been on the genealogy of the modern state and on questions of sovereignty and political representation. We intend to shift our attention to these broader themes, but before we move on we would like to pose a more general question: Why genealogies? What are the benefits of a ‘genealogical approach’ in history? The concept of genealogy I have used in some of my current research is a rather general and a rather simple one. I do not wish to imply that it has any close relation to the concept of genealogy as understood by Nietzsche and such followers of Nietzschean genealogy as Foucault. I have lost interest in the question – which is been much debated by my critics – as to whether my account is Foucauldian or a misunderstanding of Foucault; or is more Nietzschean or a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. All I want to say about genealogy is that, in the face of attempts to offer definitions of highly general and highly normative concepts – like freedom or the state – it is useful to remember something 20! Intellectual History and Political Thought which Nietzsche certainly always emphasised. This is that concepts which have histories and have been immersed in ideological debates for long periods of time necessarily escape definition. If they have highly contested histories, they cannot have neutral definitions because the definitions will themselves always be contested. That seems to me an extremely deep insight and it’s certainly a Nietzschean one. The effect of accepting it, as I do, is simply that one abandons any attempt to write grand narratives of our key concepts, conceding that often we can only hope to write genealogies in which the different ideological uses of our concepts are displayed. You have consistently argued that concepts are not to be defined but historically approached. Turning to the question of the modern state, how can we begin to recount the history of the modern state in relation to the dominant and marginal uses of the concept of the ‘state’ in our current political discourse? That question follows on nicely and naturally from the previous one, and you are right to say that the dominant usage of the term ‘state’ marginalises the traditional normative understandings of the term. It is striking that in current political discourse we talk, at least in Anglophone journalism, a great deal again about the state. But we use the term simply to refer to institutions and apparatuses of government. The state has become a mere synonym for government and this has been a tremendous loss, I think. You ask me how to recount the history of this loss. I would simply want to note three points. The first is that the concept was originally formulated to make a distinction between heads of state and bodies of people. Kantorowicz wrote in his classic text on The King’s Two Bodies about the idea that any monarch has a natural body, but also a fictional body as head of state.4 The vocabulary of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Kantorowicz 1957. On Politics and History 21 the state in Western European discourse emerged as a way of talking about that head-body relationship. Secondly, that view was challenged by the radical claim that the body of the people needs no head. The body of the people is treated as the bearer of sovereign power itself. I suppose that the greatest exemplar of that tradition is Rousseau in Du contrat social. But in the meantime, thirdly, that view of the state had been challenged by what still seems to me the most interesting of the Western European understandings of the state. This view emerged in public law in the seventeenth century, when its great exemplars were Hobbes and Pufendorf, and developed in the public law tradition running from Pufendorf to Vattel and eventually to Hegel. This tradition distinguishes the state both from the people, from the governed, and from sovereigns, the government. It insists that the state is the name of a separate person, a fictional person – although in Hegel a real person – who has to be represented by the government. The merit of this way thinking about the state, which in my recent writings I’ve been trying to revive, is that it provides you with a way of talking about the legitimacy of governmental action. On this account, governmental action is legitimate if and only if it serves to promote the interest of the state, that’s to say the interest of the people as a whole. Within contemporary political theory there is an ongoing debate on the ends of sovereignty and the state. Some scholars claim that, given the growth of international organisations and multinational entities, the modern state itself has lost its ability to take sovereign decisions; others turn to more ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘radical’ varieties of democracy, which do not centre on the nation-state as the principal political arena. Is the modern sovereign state in a time of decline and fall? How are we to theorise sovereignty in light of current debates? If you ask ‘is the modern sovereign state in decline?’, the obvious answer would be that it certainly seems to be so. As you say, international organisations now take priority over nation-states. 22! Intellectual History and Political Thought Certainly we are familiar with this arrangement in Europe with the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights and the International Court at The Hague. The jurisdictions of both those bodies supervene upon the jurisdictions of individual nation-states; the latter must conform to their requirements. At the same time, as you also indicate, international organisations claim priority over nation-states. Indeed, multinational corporations have proved to be in a position to defy nation-states, especially in the developing world. There we see multinational corporations setting the terms of investment and employment and having the power to threaten local states that they will withdraw their investment and thereby cause employment to collapse unless their requirements are met, even if those requirements are not the priorities of the local states. So, yes, it does look as if the state is in decline. But I would want to make at least two objections to this view. Recently the death of the state has surely been much exaggerated. I say recently because, in 2007, when the United States suffered the so-called credit crunch, when the banks stopped lending to each other, and then a year later when American capitalism very nearly collapsed, who came forward as the lender of last resort – even under the Republican regime of George W. Bush? The state came forward. And the same then happened in European countries as well. It happened in the United Kingdom, which was in fact the first of the heavily indebted western states to insist that the only way to cope with the collapse of the banking systems was for the state to nationalise the banks. Of course the Americans didn’t talk about the state and the British didn’t say that they were nationalising the banks, but that’s effectively what happened. A great deal of nonsense about how everything had become global and international and nation-states were at an end suddenly started to look just what it was – that is, nonsense. States continue to print money, to enforce contracts, to wage wars, to imprison their citizens, to impose taxes. No other institution in the world except On Politics and History 23 states does all of those things. Moreover, if you were to meet a stateless person who didn’t have a passport and you were to tell them that the state is over, they would certainly have a strong answer to offer. I would also want to say that it is a great mistake to suppose that the ending of the sovereignty of states, in the traditional sense that states were able to do within their borders whatever they wanted, is the same as the deconstruction of the state. When Foucault said in his famous interview in 1980 that political theory must learn ‘to cut off the king’s head’, that’s to say stop talking about sovereignty, he takes it that he is deconstructing the idea of the state.5 But if you think of the concept of the state I have tried to articulate, that it might be the name of a fictional person represented by government in the name of the common good of the people, then, obviously, the actions of states are simply the same as the lawful actions of governments. The range of actions that governments can undertake with these purposes in mind has certainly become more limited, but insofar as any such actions are performed, they are the actions of states. So it makes little sense to talk about the death of the state. Moving to instances from today’s political issues, we are witnessing social unrest and socio-political movements in many parts of the western world (UK, Spain, Greece, Mexico, to name a few examples) which, despite their great differences in contexts, seem to have one point in common: the general feeling that the citizens are not represented by their rulers and politicians. You have examined the problem of political representation in your studies on liberty, Hobbes and the modern state. What are your thoughts on the ways in which the problem of political representation is negotiated today and how does the study of modern and early modern political thought become relevant in this respect? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5 Foucault 1980. 24! Intellectual History and Political Thought I strongly agree that people at the moment do not feel properly represented. This is certainly so in my own country and I think that the feeling is quite general. We have an obvious example just at the moment, as you mentioned, in the case of Greece. There we have large-scale demonstrations on the streets by people who feel that the political class has lost legitimacy. In the case of the United Kingdom, I connect this sense of a loss of legitimacy with the fact that modern systems of representative government in Europe have picked up two traditions of thinking about representation, but at the expense of ignoring other elements, which we ought probably to be bringing back to the fore. This is another case in which history and the political theory are simply the same thing. One of the traditions we implicitly invoke in current political debate claims that by representation we simply mean having the right, by systems of authorisation, to speak and act in the name of others. So, if you vote for me, that makes me your representative. Now, there are two difficulties here. One is that it depends on what system of voting you have as to how far the result of authorising by way of voting produces good representation. That connects with a traditional feature of thinking about representation which we have lost, which is the idea of representation as picturing, as portraying, not simply giving someone a right, but offering a re-presentation of them. This visual image points to the idea that a good system of representative government would be one in which all our views were portrayed, equally represented. So the practical implication of reintroducing that image would be to reconsider our voting systems, to ask how recognisable a portrait of the people’s views they produce. In this country we have the system called ‘first pass the post’, which under Mrs. Thatcher in the 1980s produced a huge social revolution, which was voted for by less than 40% of the electorate. Whatever you think of the social revolution that took place, that cannot be an instance of democratic representation. On Politics and History 25 Certainly in this country we must somehow institute a fairer system of representation if we are count as running a democracy at all. The other tradition we tend to invoke is particularly associated with the name of Edmund Burke. This claims that, when we authorise – that is to say, vote for – a representative, we assign them the right to make their own decisions about what they think is best for us. That sweeps aside, and in Burke’s political theory was designed to sweep aside, a rival view of what it means for one person to represent another. According to the alternative view we delegate our representatives not to work out what they think is best for us, but to be told by us what we think is best for us. I cannot but feel that people would regard themselves as better represented if that traditional picture were given more salience in our political processes. It’s true that there has of late been a tendency to give this tradition greater salience. We see this in particular in the new importance of election manifestoes, in which parties bid for support by making promises to the electorate about policies which are known to be popular, and which they undertake to put into practice if elected. Something more along those lines would I think also improve people’s feeling of being represented. The problem at the moment is that the people have no means of holding their governments to their promises. We have seen a flagrant example of this in my country recently with the decision to pull yet more state funding out of the universities, which blankly contradicts one of the main election promises made by one of the partners in our coalition government. Let me make one final comment about traditional ideas of representation and their relevance. Even in pre-democratic Britain it was always conceded that the people possess a right, if they have a grievance, to make representations about it – as the phrase was – to their government. But under democracy, the people making such representations amount to nothing less than the ultimate sovereign 26! Intellectual History and Political Thought body in the state. Our governments perhaps need to pay more attention to this crucial fact about democracy, and to reflect that there is only so much that people can be asked to tolerate among policies that are often willed upon them rather than willed by themselves. Another recent political phenomenon of great proportions is what has been termed in the western world as the ‘Arab Spring’. What we are witnessing from our screens and newspapers is increasing numbers of people demanding a more democratic political order, making themselves visible by creating new public and virtual places through the use of new media. There are two questions here. What do you make of the reception of these events in the western world with particular reference to the ‘vocabulary’ which was used for their description as well as the historical analogies that were evoked for their understanding? Are these events able to offer new understandings regarding questions of political representation? I very much like your point about the vocabulary being used to describe these events. I’ve been very struck reading newspapers in this country and watching television that we are very confused, it seems to me, about the vocabulary we employ to talk about what has happened. Some of the media talk about rebels. For example, Benghazi is regularly referred to as a rebel-held city. That seems to me very unfortunate because to say that these are rebels is to concede that Gaddafi has right on his side. Those who recognise the difficulty talk instead about civil war. For example, we are now told that what is going on in Yemen is probably a civil war. But traditionally to speak of civil war is at least to imply that there may be right on both sides. It seems to me that we do not have a good vocabulary for talking about what’s been going on and I very much admire the recent brave intervention of President Obama who observed that the right way to think about these uprisings is that On Politics and History 27 they are democratic movements and as such deserve our support.6 But it does seem to me that a grave problem arises for the so-called ‘international community’ about what sort of support we should be offering to the ‘Arab Spring’. I feel that something disastrous happened in Anglophone political theory in the 1990s, which was partly the fault of neoconservatives in America and their influence. They began to develop the view that what should happen in the rest of the world was, roughly speaking, that democracy should be imposed wherever possible. This underpinned and to some degree legitimised Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Meanwhile, and disturbingly, there came to be a more liberal interpretation of this drive to democracy in the form of what came to be called in 1990s international relations theory ‘liberal interventionism’. Here the radical notion of a universal human right was used to challenge the sovereignty of purportedly tyrannical governments. Now that’s dangerous because who is to say which are the tyrannical governments? Perhaps the answer will sometimes be genuinely obvious. But even if you think you can identify the clear cases, there is going to be a double standard. Suppose you identify China or the United States as a tyrannical government. I don’t think that anyone is going to invade either of those countries. During this year we have witnessed this double standard in action. Faced with the possibility that Benghazi might suffer an actual massacre, the NATO powers decided on what I suppose would have to be called an instance of liberal interventionism. But they did not decide to take any similar action in Bahrain. One cannot help reflecting that in the latter case the Saudi Arabians would have been seriously annoyed, and nobody wants the oil turned off. It looks too as if there will be no intervention in Syria, although the genocidal threat seems to be at least as serious there as !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 See Barack Obama’s speech on the Middle East, State Department, 19 May 2011. 28! Intellectual History and Political Thought in Libya. So evident has the double standard been that it will, I suspect, have the effect of discrediting the idea of liberal interventionism altogether, which in some ways might not be a bad thing. You also asked about whether these uprisings offer new understandings of representation. One obvious point to make here is that the problem that is faced, certainly in Libya, is that there are no representative institutions. This has been a completely personal regime, so far as I understand it, and certainly one with no corps intermédiaires that Montesquieu would recognise. It is simply an autocracy without any representative institutions. These would have to be created and that is going to be a very large task of constitution building. But, meanwhile, we have been reminded of an old and thrilling point, which is that, if you are a democrat, then you believe that sovereignty is the property of the people. What we are seeing in the Arab Spring is the unbelievable bravery of citizens attempting to recapture their own sovereign power. We would like to conclude this interview by addressing one of your most original contributions in political theory, which is your analysis of liberty. A major criticism you have made of liberalism is the impoverished way it conceives of the concept of liberty, especially when compared to the way the neo-roman or republican tradition understands it. You have maintained that, for the liberal tradition, citizens are free as long as they do not suffer unjust or unnecessary interference in the pursuit of their chosen goals; by contrast, the republican tradition holds that only a man or woman is free when he or she lives in the absence of dependency, that is to say, when citizens are not under an arbitrary or discretionary power. Do you think the problems we have discussed about sovereignty and political representation are somehow related to this impoverished liberal concept of liberty? How would a republican theory of freedom help us in dealing with these issues? I think that the republican theory can help. If it can, it is because of an implication of the theory, as you have just laid it out, which I On Politics and History 29 want to say a word about first. When republican theorists contrast freedom, not with interference but with living in dependence on the will of other people, one important point they wish to make about the state of dependence is that it has an inevitable tendency to generate self-censorship. If you are living wholly at the mercy of somebody else, if you are living in a regime of arbitrary power so that you live wholly in dependence upon those who hold that power, then there are going to be very many things that you will not dare to say and do. Notice that this is not because you know what will happen to you if you say or do them, it is because you do not know what will happen to you. Of course, nothing may happen to you. But, on the other hand, if the power is arbitrary, you might risk everything by speaking out or by acting according to your conscience. So it becomes almost impossible to speak out and almost impossible to act according to your conscience. That is one way in which despotisms and tyrannies manage to hold peoples down – by this particular fear that dependency creates. So that is what the republican would want to say about the social and political regimes we are thinking about. Now, if all that is so, it seems to me that there are three levels at which the republican theory might have something of value to tell us. The first is the social level. The theory reminds us that we are far less free than the liberal emphasis on freedom as noninterference might lead us to suppose. Consider, for example, the levels of unfreedom that are generated on a republican understanding simply by the phenomenon, which has been widespread in the capitalist countries of the West in recent times, of de-unionising the economies, de-unionising labour. If you find yourself without any power of collective bargaining, facing your bosses, you are going to be far more in a position of dependence, and therefore unfreedom, than would otherwise be the case. Another instance where at the social level the theory may have something valuable to remind us about unfreedom stems from what 30! Intellectual History and Political Thought we’re beginning to learn, at least in Western European countries, about the shocking levels of domestic violence in our societies. We are talking here about very vulnerable people who are too frightened to speak out about the conditions under which they live. Again, their unfreedom is a product of dependence, and means have got to be found to liberate such vulnerable people. A third and topical example, particularly topical in Ireland, is what happened a generation ago, but within living memory, in the Catholic Church’s relationship to its communities. It has emerged that in Ireland terrifying levels of child abuse were tolerated because people simply did not dare to speak out against the prestige of the Church. They would not have been believed, the Church would always have been believed instead of them, a conspiracy of silence fell. Freedom was thereby taken away. It was not taken away by any act of interference; it was taken away by a regime of deference and fear. So at the social level, I’m saying, the theory might have much to commend it. At the political level, the second level I’d like to say a word about, it’s quite clear that a republican view of freedom has something to tell us about institution-building. If you are unfree so long as you are dependent upon the will of somebody else, then you can only be free as a citizen if in some way you can recognise that the law reflects your will. If it doesn’t reflect your will, it must reflect the will of somebody else, some political class or some ruling class. But if it reflects only their will, then you remain dependent on their will and that takes away your freedom. So the connection between freedom and equality is very much more emphasised by the republican view and puts a strong pressure on designing institutions that will enable people to be equally heard in legislative processes. Finally, let me just say a word about republican freedom at the international level. The key moral demand of the republican theory is that, in the name of freedom, we should seek to minimise and, if possible, avoid relations of domination and dependence. But, if you On Politics and History 31 think about it, international relations at the moment, and especially relations between the developed and the developing world, are largely relations of domination and dependence. The moral demand of the theory of freedom that interests me would be upon the international community to minimise these relationships of domination and dependence and to seek for a more equal world. Works Cited Foucault, Michel (1980). ‘Truth and Power’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings by Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon, New York, NY. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1957). The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theory, Princeton, NJ. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1967). A Short Ηistory of Εthics, London, pp. 2-3. Martí, José Luis and Philip Pettit (2010). A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero’s Spain, Princeton, NJ. Obama, Barack (2011). Speech on the Middle East, State Department, 19 May 2011. Pettit, Phillip (1997). Republicanism, Oxford. Skinner, Quentin (1969). ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ History and Theory 8.1, pp. 3-53. (2002). Vision of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method, Cambridge.