"Modernity" in Western Political Thought

Abstract

T --HE question I propose to consider is whether it is meaningful to speak of political and if so on what grounds and with what qualifying observations. This is obviously a vast problem, and within the limits of an essay one can hope at best only to illustrate some of the difficulties involved and to throw out some hints at their possible resolution. The conventional periodization adopted in histories of political thought assumes that a profound break in the continuity of western political speculation occurs around 1500; this date presumably marks the beginning of as opposed to political thought. Courses in the history of political thought which extend over the academic year generally devote the first semester to ancient and medieval, and the second to modern writers and movements. A similar subdivision of the field of political theory into modern and premodern periods for examination purposes is frequently encountered in graduate school curricula. One possible objection deserving of serious consideration not only to the conventional periodization in political theory but to any periodization whatsoever would be that serious political thought, or political theory, is a branch of philosophy and that strictly speaking philosophy has no history but is independent of place and time. The temporal location of a particular thinker is of only peripheral interest; we are interested primarily in whether a political teaching can sustain what it asserts when brought to the bar of reason. Political theory, conceived of as the critical inquiry into the first principles of politics, is then from this point of view a seamless web, and to divide it into modern and pre-modern phases is arbitrary and conceivably betrays a bias, which is inadvisable in philosophical inquiry as such, for or against