By PERRY ANDERSON*
Cambridge’s “revolution in the history of political thought,” despite its insistence on the primacy of historical context, did not generally apply its precepts to itself.
The charge—if not the term—of “presentism,” as the abstraction of past ideas from their historical context in order to use them erroneously in the present, first gained notoriety with The whig interpretation of history by Herbert Butterfield, written in the early 1930s.
The term, which was probably already widespread in Cambridge in the 1950s, acquired full validity and strength with the first methodological texts by Quentin Skinner, John Dunn and JGA Pocock, who debated the history of ideas as practiced by Arthur Lovejoy or George H. Sabine or, in a different register, by CB Macpherson.
The proposal for a radical transformation in the way the field (thought) should be studied found its realization in The ancient constitution and the feudal law by JGA Pocock, The foundation of modern political thought by Quentin Skinner and The political thought of John Locke by John Dunn. No protocol of the Cambridge School was more severe or gained wider acceptance than the prohibition of presentism.
The political ideas of the past belonged to the languages of the past, which had no continuity with those of the present, and had to be reconstructed if the true meaning of any text articulated in these languages was to be understood. Such political ideas were not available to be mistransposed into contemporary discourses.
Cambridge’s “revolution in the history of political thought,” despite its insistence on the primacy of historical context, did not generally apply its precepts to itself. But the setting in which it originated seems clear enough: the postwar consensus in the Anglo-Saxon world, in which the philosophy of language was flourishing and the promise of the end of ideologies was beginning to emerge. This was, at least as far as domestic politics were concerned, a markedly depoliticized arena. (As far as foreign policy was concerned, the Cold War was far from over.)
In continental Europe, however, conditions were not so mild; with the recent rise of fascism and resistance to it, together with a persistent backdrop of communism and a struggle to contain or suppress it, ideological passions were much more heightened. It is therefore not surprising that the warnings of the Cambridge School were little heeded.
In Germany in the 1950s and early 1960s, the two emblematic works on the history of ideas, Criticism and Criticism (1954) by Reinhart Koselleck and Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) by Jürgen Habermas could be seen, in their own way, as a revolution in methods and findings, much as the work of the Cambridge historians was in Britain. Yet neither had difficulty in establishing direct—and antithetical—connections between Enlightenment concepts of the public sphere and burning contemporary concerns: the dangers of totalitarianism, the culture of commodified media, and delegative democracy.
Such European usages of the past persisted. Just think of Norberto Bobbio, who began writing about Thomas Hobbes in the 1940s. Three decades later, he had no doubts in transposing the molds of Leviathan to the war risks of the nuclear age nor to argue in favor of a singular superpower with a monopoly on extreme interstate violence to ensure a stable peace (Il Problema della Guerra e le vie delle Pace). Or, on the contrary, Jürgen Habermas who was able to return, without feeling the slightest inconvenience or perceiving the slightest incongruity, to Kant's scheme of perpetual peace as a model for the United Nations during the 1990s.
Or, more recently, Pierre Rosanvallon, who brought Guizot back into public discussion in the 1980s to promote the advantages of a recovery of French liberalism — The Guizot Moment (1985) as a subsidiary operation of the then “Furet moment” —, and takes up the French politician of the XNUMXth century with the same objectives in Counter-Democracy (2006), twenty years later. Ultimately, in these continental declinations — presentism did not produce greater anxieties.
It might be objected that these thinkers, with the exception of Reinhart Koselleck, cannot be considered historians in the strict sense—and one might even accuse Reinhart Koselleck of practicing something closer to a philosophical form than to a conventional form of history. But when we come into contact with the later productions of the Cambridge historians, we notice that they themselves departed for some time from the ascetic prescriptions of their youth.
The reasons for this change are not difficult to discover. The placid, indisputable truths of the 1950s no longer held. Liberty before Liberalism (1988) by Skinner, seeks to recover in Marchamont Nedham, James Harrinston and Algernon Sydney, “neo-Roman” ideas of freedom as non-dependence on the will of others, and proposes them as an antidote to the Hobbesian conception of negative freedom as the mere absence of impediments to action, which has become part of common sense.
This construction, an obvious reaction to the era of Thatcherism, could be attributed precisely to the same sin whose condemnation founded Quentin Skinner's fame. For Blair Worden and JGA Pocock, it was clearly presentist. John Dunn, more radically dissatisfied with the development of Western democracy, in Setting the People Free (2005) turned to Robespierre and Babeuf to seek clues about the limits that the “order of selfishness” imposes on democracy.
Even JGAPocock, the most authoritative of all, could not resist the temptation of the gift. His The Machiavillian Moment ended with the Watergate scandal. However, his way of linking the past with the present was clearly different. Richard Nixon can appear in the pages of JGAPocock as a creature straight from the imagination of a typical member of the Old Whigs, however, its manner is not the open presentation of the thinkers of the past as teaching for the present, but another, it is at the same time more oblique and more direct.
The Discovery of Islands (2005), does not employ Tucker or Gibbon. However, his fierce attack on the dismantling of national sovereignty and the triumphs of the commodification of the European Union — an object of Quentin Skinner’s admiration — is more intentionally political than any of JGAPocock’s colleagues have allowed themselves to be. There is no need to trace his line of descent: there is no doubt that we are dealing with republicanism, in the peculiarly incisive sense that the young Pocock revealed to moderns.
Is all this recurrence nothing more than a late lapse of presentism? The term is open to confusion. The meaning of a political idea can only be understood in its historical context—social, intellectual, linguistic. To remove it from this context is an anachronism. However, contrary to the worn-out assertion attributed to Wittgenstein, meaning and use are not the same. Ideas from the past can acquire contemporary relevance—even, on certain occasions, greater than they originally had—without being misinterpreted. There is no guarantee against their distortion, nor can there be any assurance of their mummification.[1]
*Perry Anderson, historian, political philosopher and essayist, is a professor of history and sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles and founder of the New Left Review. Author, among other books, of Selective Affinities (boitempo).
Lecture at the Colloquium “The Public Uses of History”, organized by Princeton University.
Translation: Ronaldo Tadeu de Souza & Lais Fernanda Fonseca de Souza.
Translators' note
[1] Some of the works cited by Perry Anderson in the text have been translated into Portuguese. Quentin Skinner – The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Freedom before Liberalism, ed. Unesp, 2001. JGA Pocock – The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, ed. Eduff, 2022. Reinhart Koselleck – Criticism and Crisis, ed. UERJ/Contraponto, 1999. Jürgen Habermas – Structural Change in the Public Sphere, ed. Unesp, 2014. Norberto Bobbio – The Problem of War and the Paths to Peace, ed. Unesp, 2003. Pierre Rosanvallon – Counter-Democracy: Politics in the Age of Distrust, ed. Humanities Editorial Workshop, 2022. François Furet – Thinking about the French Revolution, ed. Peace and Land, 1989.
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