Review of Time, History, and Political Thought by John Robertson (ed.)
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 11: Time.
Among the many ‘turns’ by which historians like to signify developments within their discipline, one of the most significant is the rise of ‘time’ or ‘temporality’ as a subject unto itself. Its viability as such was established by the German scholar Reinhart Koselleck in the second half of the twentieth century, and then defended in the twenty-first by his French disciple, François Hartog. Scholars on our shores, however, have tended to regard the more speculative of their arguments with some suspicion. In his 2005 Very Short Introduction to ‘The History of Time’ (that series, published by Oxford University Press, is generally a reliable index of the prevailing sentiments of Anglophone scholarship), Leofranc Holford-Strevens gave a wide berth to the ‘conceptual problems’ inherent in discussions and definitions of time. ‘I shall confine myself to time’, he declared in a pointedly Anglo-Saxon vein, ‘in its ordinary-language or man-in-the-street sense, and shall concentrate on the methods by which its passage is and has been measured’. His ‘history of time’ has little by way of Koselleck’s Erfahrungsraum, Erwartungshorizont, or Sattelzeit; it concerns itself instead with computus, calendars, and clocks.
But the continental fashions couldn’t be resisted forever, and in 2019 the ‘temporal turn’ found the best emissary its advocates could have hoped for. In Time and Power, Sir Christopher Clark demonstrated with reference to four German leaders – Frederick William the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Hitler – that politics, both in theory and practice, is rooted in conceptions of time; and he pursued these themes further in a lively collection of essays published in 2021. Still, for all Sir Christopher’s efforts, the ‘historian of time’ is likely to be met with the same raised eyebrow as the ‘anthropologist of humans’, or the ‘chemist of matter’. ‘Time’ is a topic at once so enormous, intangible, and basic to the historian’s craft, that it is difficult even to talk about without becoming unmoored.
In Time, History, and Political Thought, John Robertson opens the introduction to his edited volume by acknowledging the risk of sliding into banality. ‘Among statements of the obvious’, he writes, ‘few are likely to seem more obvious than that politics takes place in time and is subject to history.’ But such statements of the obvious are always worth interrogating in full. ‘Time’, and the myriad ways in which it has been conceptualised, may be a useful and important subject of historical analysis, after all.
Robertson has assembled an impressive team to make the case with him. We have rock stars playing their greatest hits: Caroline Humfress and Magnus Ryan on Roman law; Sarah Mortimer on early-modern politics and religion; and (a shoo-in for the Pyramid Stage) Quentin Skinner on Thomas Hobbes. Other icons treat us to their newer material: George Garnett, who has written much on mediaeval law, turns to its greatest student and explicator, F.W. Maitland; John Robertson forays ‘before the Enlightenment’ with an essay on sacred history. They are joined by a legion of younger talent: Emma Stone Mackinnon on the Algerian Revolution; Charlotte Johann on the German Historical School of Jurisprudence and its critics; Waseem Yaqoob with a dissection of, inter alia, Koselleck himself. As in any collection of essays, there are some tensions and disagreements to be drawn out; but overall, the contributors sing in concert.
Lurking in the background is J.G.A. Pocock. It is tempting to view the whole collection, published in his hundredth year, as a Festschrift in all but name. In his seminal book on The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), Pocock demonstrated the interplay between political and historical thought in the seventeenth century, and he later took this method of historical analysis into the eighteenth century with his six-volume exegesis of Edward Gibbon. His own collection of essays, Politics, Language, and Time (1989), is the signal inspiration for this volume; and in the introduction, Robertson explicitly favours his approach to ‘time’ over Koselleck’s.
The volume is called Time, History, and Political Thought, but it could just as well include the word Law. Its jurisprudential preoccupations are announced early on, with two erudite essays on Roman law. Caroline Humfress looks to the foundational texts, the Corpus Iuris Civilis; she argues that the divergence between East and West in their respective conceptions of ‘eternity’, apparent in the legal sources, was a corollary of a profound theological and Christological divergence. Her detection of a strong anti-Chalcedonian influence on Byzantine jurisprudence ought to spark fruitful debate. The story is then continued by Magnus Ryan, who rescues the scholastic jurists of the high and late middle ages from the well-worn charge (alluded to, in fact, by Maitland, as cited in Garnett’s contribution) of being slavishly ‘ahistorical’ in their worldview.
Later, in his chapter on conjectural history in the Scottish Enlightenment, Aaron Garrett cites Lord Kames to the effect that ‘Lawyers are seldom Historians, and Historians… seldom Lawyers’. For Maitland, the crucial difference between lawyers and legal historians was that the former followed a ‘logic of authority’ and the latter a ‘logic of evidence’. This remark has often been misunderstood; so Garnett in his contribution explains what Maitland really meant, and why historians of political thought ought to take heed of it. The nature of the relationship between law and history was also a hugely controversial matter in nineteenth-century Germany. Charlotte Johann narrates this ‘guerre flagrante’ with verve, giving us a pungent portrait of its two key players, Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Eduard Gans. The sheer vindictiveness of their rivalry is laid bare: Savigny, the doyen of the Historical School, is the villain of the piece, scheming to freeze Gans out of the academic establishment, and exploiting Gans’ Jewishness to this end. The dispute between the historical jurist and the Hegelian philosopher was viciously personal; but Johann invites us to consider what was really, intellectually, at stake.
Another theme that emerges from the book as a whole, very much grist to the editor’s mill, is that of a transnational, coherent, and unified ‘Enlightenment’. Both Aaron Garrett and Silvia Sebastiani stress continental influences on the historical thought of the Scottish Enlightenment; Sebastiani’s essay functions in part as a Scottish reception history of the Comte de Buffon. The influence went both ways, and some of the most arresting observations in Chris Meckstroth’s essay on Kant concern the continental reception of Alexander Pope.
Most of the essays in this volume reflect, in a Pocockian vein, on the relationship between political and historical thought. Waseem Yaqoob traces German historicism from Leopold von Ranke to Friedrich Meinecke, and Koselleck’s assault on it under the wing of his Doktorvater, Carl Schmitt. Emma Stone Mackinnon explores how thinkers like Frantz Fanon understood the French Revolution: it was something to be inspired by, but not merely aped, and they wanted their own anticolonial revolutions to mark a similar rupture from the past to that which Koselleck found in 1789. Robertson explores the influence of seventeenth-century sacred history on the thought of Spinoza, and instructively compares Spinoza with Hobbes. Hobbes also looms large in Kinch Hoekstra’s essay on seventeenth-century ‘Politic History’. Against Timothy Raylor, Hoekstra takes a similar view of Hobbes to that which Johann takes of Gans, Ryan of the scholastic jurists, Humfress of their Justinianic forebears, and Garnett of the common lawyers: Hobbes did not ‘reject history’.
Which brings us to the headline act. Skinner’s Hobbes, perhaps unlike Hoekstra’s, remains largely ‘atemporal’, ‘ahistorical’. One of the striking things about Hobbes, Skinner points out, is that he never advised a ‘capacity to act with timeliness’ as a ‘valuable quality for rulers to cultivate’. This is why Leviathan seems to mark such a break from earlier texts in political philosophy, the mirrors-for-princes and the like; Hobbes was opposed to the ‘preoccupation with timeliness that he felt to be hindering a scientific approach to statecraft’.
Skinner concludes his essay by noting an objection ‘powerfully articulated by Hobbes’ indefatigable adversary Bishop Bramhall in his Catching of Leviathan of 1658’. Bramhall, Skinner says,
[R]aises a doubt about Hobbes’ project of a science of politics that needs to be pondered. As he suggests, Hobbes’ refusal to engage with contingencies, and his insistence on dwelling exclusively on general rules, should perhaps be regarded not as an advance in the theory of statecraft but rather as a misunderstanding of its character.
Hobbes, on Bramhall’s account, failed to think historically, and thinking historically – as these historical essays unsurprisingly claim – is a virtue in political theory. Bramhall’s critique of Hobbes bears some contemporary resonance; we might even say, with a tongue in cheek, that Bramhall (of Sidney Sussex!) was proto-Cambridge School. That ideas are contingent, and must therefore be understood contextually, is precisely what the Cambridge School has tried to impress upon political theory. Hobbes’ timeless ‘science of politics’ is an intellectual dead-end; even something as basic as how we conceive of ‘time’, as this collection lays bare, is a political and historical contingency, and any political theory must be embedded in such contingencies. This, in sum, is an ambitious volume, which seeks to win over Hobbes’ successors in the timeless ‘science of politics’ on the one hand, and sceptics about the ‘temporal turn’ on the other. That it has any chance of success, in both pursuits, owes to the fact that the essays all impressively steer the course between the Scylla of wishy-washy pretension and the Charybdis of banality.
Samuel Rubinstein is a Masters student in History at the Universities of Leiden, Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and Oxford.