We tend to take ‘theory’ for granted as an object of historical study, especially in relation to the history of political thought. Consider the way it is presumed by even a committed contextualist such as Quentin Skinner in his treatment of Niccolò Machiavelli. Skinner writes of ‘Machiavelli's political theory’, claims that ‘Machiavelli's is a theory of negative liberty’, and parses the history of political thought by species of theorist, hence he identifies ‘a neo-Roman theorist like Machiavelli’.Footnote 1 As Skinner has done as much as anybody to show, the conventions of argument that Machiavelli used and modified were remote from those in operation today. One need only think of Machiavelli's Il principe (1513), a book addressed to Florence's recently returned Medici rulers and written in a pattern established by earlier advisers when presenting the vir virtutis as needing to cope with the caprices of fortuna.Footnote 2 The same point holds for Machiavelli's Discorsi (1531), a commentary on a Roman history with a view to furnishing lessons for contemporary legislators and citizens. The implicit presumption is that little is lost by construing either advice to princes or Renaissance commentary as ‘theory’. Beyond Machiavelli, the presumption is the same – that there is little harm in describing the work of Aristotle,Footnote 3 or Hooker,Footnote 4 or Smith,Footnote 5 or whomever, as ‘theory’.
The thrust of this article is that the costs can be high, and that in consequence ‘theory’ ought not to be considered a generic category capable of neutrally describing a given piece of thinking from the past, in contrast to the historicizing potential of other notions, such as ‘political languages’,Footnote 6 ‘speech acts’,Footnote 7 and ‘intellectual techniques’.Footnote 8 The case is made in relation to ‘political theory’, where the historiographical costs can be thought of in terms of two known vices. The first is anachronism. At least in the British context, the historical record suggests that ‘political theory’ – as an avowed activity – and the ‘political theorist’ – as an avowed identity – first flickered into life only around the turn of the nineteenth century. The second vice is assimilation: converting earlier patterns of thought to today's ‘political theory’. At this point, it should be conceded that the label ‘political theory’ currently references diverse styles of thought, and that we take Rawls's A theory of justice (1971) to embody its two key features.Footnote 9 First, the political theorist elaborates and combines abstract concepts for comprehending or ordering political life, and refers to the results with the prestigious label of ‘theory’. Second, they do so untethered to the intellectual and ethical needs of actual officeholders, such as politicians, judges, and bureaucrats. This is something that we do today, but whether or not it was done in the past is a matter to be investigated.
Assimilation is a more serious failing than anachronism, and it is illustrated in the two examples discussed in what follows. The first is Matthew Hale's response to Thomas Hobbes's attack on the common law. Hale's Reflections by the Lrd. Cheife Justice Hale on Mr. Hobbes his dialogue of the lawe (c. 1673) set out the nature of legal judgement and judicial office in response to a manuscript version of Hobbes's Dialogue between a philosopher and a student of the common laws of England (1681), which traversed the same issues but from the point of view of sovereignty. Both texts were composed in the register of ‘office talk’ – the specification of forms of conduct and reasoning that were appropriate to a given office.Footnote 10 Being tethered to an office, the reasoning was local in nature. In fact, Hale used ‘Theoryes’ and ‘Speculacons’ to negatively redescribe Hobbes's approach; far from being a neutral catch-all term for thinking about political life, in Hale's hands ‘Theoryes’ was a sparingly used dysphemism for an illegitimate form of reflection.Footnote 11 It is plainly difficult to capture all of this when everything is assumed to be theoretical in nature ab initio.
The example of Hale and Hobbes points to the need to identify when ‘political theory’ became a respectable label for a style or styles of apprehending political life. Obviously this task exceeds the bounds of the present article.Footnote 12 The aim here is merely to register one aspect of this process: the emergence of explicit defences of abstraction as a legitimate intellectual operation to perform on political life, and the placing of this activity under the name of ‘political theory’. For one of the leading objections to political speculation in the early modern period – found in Hale and after – was its detachment from practice, experience, and tradition. Investigating this issue in the British context inevitably leads to Edmund Burke's condemnation of abstract thought in his Reflections on the revolution in France (1790), in which the path to safety and stability lay with eschewing ‘abstract principles’, ‘general theories’, and ‘theoretic science’, and instead following the ‘practical wisdom’ embodied in inherited institutions and recorded freedoms.Footnote 13 Burke's text enjoyed only a lukewarm reception initially, but by the time of The Terror (1793–4) it was widely accepted that Burke's predictions had materialized in the guillotine, and his arguments enjoyed great traction with those supporting the existing order.Footnote 14 It was in this hostile context that those committed to abstract speculation as a guide to politics bit the bullet and began to prepare positive accounts of abstract theoretical inquiry, with James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae (1791) and Dugald Stewart's Elements of the philosophy of the human mind (1792) the standout examples, examined below.
The leading implication of this second example is that to use ‘political theory’ and ‘political theorist’ today when describing the past without first determining their appropriateness is to unconsciously take a partisan position in the debate over the place of theory in political life. In fact, it will be shown that a leading tactic adopted by political theorists in this period – and ever since – was to redescribe the arguments of their opponents as theory on the grounds that theoretical claims were implicit in their rivals’ argumentation. This allowed political theorists to treat opposing, non-theoretical arguments as if they were, in fact, political theory, but of poor quality. Here, the costs of the assimilation involved in redescribing all previous political thought as ‘theory’ become surprisingly high. They can largely be avoided by pursuing the usual historiographical virtues associated with identifying historical contexts.
I
The case for approaching Hobbes as a political theorist might appear strong. In both De cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651), Hobbes described his approach as a ‘science’.Footnote 15 Further, in Leviathan, Hobbes underlined the geometric nature of his definitions, declaring that establishing the ‘right Definition of Names’ constituted the ‘Acquisition of Science’.Footnote 16 By contrast, ‘Rhetoricall figures’ were identified as dangerous, especially the technique of paradiastole, by which vices could be recast as virtues, and virtues as vices.Footnote 17 Yet it is only our contemporary association of science and theory that suggests the connection. Hobbes's deployment of ‘science’ and ‘geometry’ reveals an intellectual milieu remote from our own, one that supported his desired relationship between natural and civil science.Footnote 18 The key point for our purpose is that Hobbes did not use the label of ‘theory’ when it came to examining states and citizens but self-consciously pursued a different ideal that was perfectly intelligible in his time.
Something similar needs to be said with respect to the presence of philosophy in Hobbes's work. Epicurus has been identified as a source for Hobbes's account of matter in motion, and Hobbes was certainly attacked by his contemporaries for the Epicurean elements of his work, dangerously visible in his account of human thoughts as derived from the senses.Footnote 19 Moving in the opposite direction, despite Hobbes's reputation as an anti-Aristotelian, he has been portrayed as having important debts to this tradition.Footnote 20 Given that Hobbes wrote on the state and sovereignty – a central theoretical object for political theory today – it is tempting to treat the presence of philosophical sources such as Epicurus and Aristotle in Hobbes's work as guaranteeing his standing as a political theorist.
The issue here is, again, that contemporary associations colour the past. In the first place, the tight pairing of philosophy and political theory did not exist. Secondly, and more importantly, philosophy in Hobbes's time was not like philosophy today. Above all, ‘the philosopher’ was not a well-defined persona; the boundaries of philosophy were unclear and unsettled, and did not exclude religion. Correspondingly, the Bible, various Asian and Greek sources, and pre-Christian Jewish texts formed an important part of a canon that was not organized around today's ‘epistemological paradigm’.Footnote 21 While Hobbes developed his civil science in large part as an escape from this humanist culture, his admirer Samuel Pufendorf gave it pride of place in De jure naturae et gentium (1672), citing endless ancient authorities to build an observational-historical account of the state of nature, in opposition to Hobbes's derivation of man's natural condition from ‘human nature’.Footnote 22 In summary, a battleline between humanism and civil science was forming, the ‘philosopher’ straddled it, and the ‘political theorist’ was absent from the field.
In relation to the texts under study here, Hobbes's Dialogue between a philosopher and a student of the common laws of England, and Hale's response, Reflections by the Lrd. Cheife Justice Hale on Mr. Hobbes his dialogue of the lawe, a different account has been developed in which the presumption that these are texts of political theory has been suspended. What emerges in its place is the centrality of the rhetoric of office. Office talk was ubiquitous in the seventeenth century, and Conal Condren has argued powerfully that it amounted to a ‘presupposition’ of political thought.Footnote 23 One consequence of a society organizing its thinking around office was that debate was not likely to take place at an abstract level because it tended to cohere around the appropriate actions of officeholders. In short, it tended towards discussion of the obligations of particular officeholders and their casuistical exceptions, not towards theoretical reflection at a more general level.
In the dispute between Hale and Hobbes, at issue was the scope of judicial office. That is, how judges carried out the business of adjudicating in court. Their respective texts are thus not best approached as theoretical interventions into systems of concepts but as rival manuals purporting to delineate the character and limits of judicial office. It follows that the practice of criticizing Hale for suppressing theories of ‘human equality’, ‘natural rights’, and ‘utility’Footnote 24 mischaracterizes Hale's contribution: it was never an attempt to develop moral philosophy but an attempt by the most senior judge in England to specify appropriate judicial comportment.
Less a debate than a learning exercise, the Dialogue consists of Hobbes's Phylosopher, a thin veil for Hobbes himself, correcting the errors of the Lawyer, whose role consisted of repeating various of former Chief Justice Edward Coke's statements on the common law for the Phylosopher to disprove, the Lawyer conceding each time. Hobbes's argument throughout was that judicial office was subordinate to sovereign office, which was held by the king. The king made all law, and it was these laws that were enforced by the judiciary of the realm. Judicial office was cast as subservient within a hierarchical institutional framework. In articulating such an account of judicial office, Hobbes was not repeating a truism of English legal debate. He was adopting a polemical stance on the subordination of judicial office, which aligned him with earlier arguments made by James VI/I, and Francis Bacon, against assertions of judicial independence from the sovereign of the type that common lawyers such as Christopher St German and Edward Coke had earlier made. In other words, Hobbes was joining a pre-existing debate regarding the common law.
Hobbes's account of the subordination of judicial to sovereign office focused on the king's supposedly exclusive power to make laws. Above all, Hobbes sought to counter the argument that the judge had a role in law-making beyond subservience, as claimed by St German and Coke.Footnote 25 On this common law view, judges exercised a unique form of reason that enabled them to create judgements through synthesizing laws, including laws that arose from sources other than the king, such as custom, with the result that interpretive latitude was vested in judicial expertise. This was simply impossible for Hobbes's Phylosopher because judges held office at the king's discretion. ‘Coke himself’, for example, was judge only ‘because the King made him so’.Footnote 26
Further, there were no sources of law beyond the king because ‘Authority…makes a Law’, and the relevant authority was that of the king, he that ‘hath the Soveraignty’.Footnote 27 As law was ‘a very little part’ of philosophy, Hobbes's debaters cited Aristotle in defining justice as ‘giving to every Man his own’.Footnote 28 Justice was realized, according to the Phylosopher, through statute law, the creation of which was an attribute of sovereign office.Footnote 29 As James had argued before him, Hobbes claimed that ‘all the Laws of England have been made by the Kings of England’.Footnote 30 Following Bacon, it was sovereign will that constituted the range of judicial office: ‘the Kings Reason…is that Anima Legis, that Summa Lex…and that Summa Ratio’ (the Kings Reason…is that soul of the law, that highest law…and that highest reason).Footnote 31 Not even the respected legal doctrine of following precedents was endorsed by Hobbes. For ‘Precedents’, the Phylosopher argued, ‘prove only what was done, and not what was well done’.Footnote 32
Given the narrow scope of judicial office in Hobbes's account, the Phylosopher emphasized the simplicity of judicial office, dismissing the pretentions of the judiciary to operate an office that amounted to anything more than the administration of a superior's dictates. As judges need only read the preamble of statutes to understand the sovereign's will, the Phylosopher claimed to be ‘able to perform the Office of a judge…within a Month, or two’.Footnote 33 Indeed, so limited was the scope of judicial office that it contained no capacity to redress monarchical action. The king could not be bound by law, as ‘he who is Subject to none but God, can make a Law upon himself’ and ‘as easily abrogate’ it.Footnote 34 Moreover, ‘no part of his Legislative Power, or any other Essential part of Royalty can be taken from him by a Statute’.Footnote 35
Revealing his focus on the powers of judges in specific circumstances, Hobbes addressed his specification of the limited powers of the judiciary to the question of the king's capacity to raise money to fund an army. Hobbes's Phylosopher asserted that ‘it is the King that makes the Laws’, and that the capacity to make ‘Laws effectual’ rested on the ‘Power to Leavy Souldiers…to raise an Army…and Money to Maintain it’.Footnote 36 The implicit reference here was to the 1628 Petition of Right. The Petition had been drafted by Coke, and declared that the king did not have an exclusive right to taxation, but required the parliament's consent.Footnote 37 Out of the necessity to raise money, Charles I had accepted it. Hobbes claimed that the Petition was illegal, an underhanded attempt at limiting the sovereign's actual powers, which included the unrestrained capacity to tax the people. Indeed, the absence of such a power would be nonsensical, since the sovereign existed to ensure the ‘safety of the People’, and he would be ‘disabled to perform his Office’ should he be unable to introduce taxation.Footnote 38 Taking an explicit swipe at the common lawyers, the Phylosopher blamed those ‘Learned in the Laws’ who ‘speak evil of the Governors’ for perpetuating the idea that the king's powers were limited.Footnote 39
In light of the foregoing, it is possible to reconsider Hobbes's account of the Norman Conquest in the Dialogue, which has been described as ‘theory’.Footnote 40 First, Hobbes's treatment of William's 1066 invasion was marginal to his account of judicial office, receiving only brief mention in the Dialogue. Where Hobbes's Phylosopher deployed an argument from conquest, it was secondary to his argument on judicial office, and only represented evidence of judicial office's subordination to sovereignty. In the course of arguing for the king's unrestrained power as law-maker, Hobbes nominated the Norman Conquest as one of the reasons. William as ‘Conqueror’ was subject only to ‘Laws of God…and to no other’, and this ‘Right…Descended to our present King’.Footnote 41 Judicial subservience arose from conquest. Second, Hobbes's Phylosopher had no commitment to this account of conquest, embracing a contradictory account of English history when it suited his polemic. Where conquest theory has been seen as the enemy of accounts of legal immemoriality, which were supposedly mobilized to limit monarchical power, Hobbes's Phylosopher relied equally on claims drawn from ancient law. Hence, when again asserting the king's unfettered power, the Phylosopher argued that ‘the Antient Common-Law’ showed that kings faced no ‘Bridle’ except ‘the fear of God’.Footnote 42 In the same chapter, the Phylosopher claimed first that a 1066 conquest gave Charles II unlimited power, before making the same point from contradictory evidence, the ancient law of England that preceded the Norman invasion. Again, Hobbes's Dialogue proceeds by repurposing available arguments – regardless of whether they were contradictory or not – into an attack on the supposed autonomy of judicial office.
Turning now to Hale, like Hobbes's Dialogue, the dating of Hale's Reflections is uncertain, though it is likely that he wrote it in the last years of his life.Footnote 43 The core argument of the Reflections was that judicial office was independent of the sovereign, for it drew on legal sources that included, but were not limited to, the king, and because the learning required to interpret and synthesize these sources was so complex as to render judicial work incomprehensible to the untrained. Like Hobbes, Hale was working from an established topos, drawing on St German and Coke.
Hale's response to Hobbes's attack on judicial office was, like the Dialogue, organized around the rhetoric of judicial office. The Reflections opened with a detailed discussion of the ways in which arts of reasoning were contingent on the office to which they were attached, a crucial pointer to the style of argument at hand. Hale acknowledged that reason was a ‘Facultie co[m]mon’ among all men, but not one distributed in equal measure, for men possessed ‘various degrees of Quickness, Activitie and perfection in this reasoning facultie’.Footnote 44 Different men's reasoning faculties also fixed more easily on certain offices than others, for example, a reason ‘dextrous and ready in Phisick is not Suited for Politiques’.Footnote 45 In fact, Hale scorned those who would attempt to command a universal reason: ‘those that p[re]tend to an universall Knowledge are but Superficiall and Seldome peirce deepe into any thinge’.Footnote 46
Not only was reason variable in each person by nature, but it underwent further modification once applied to office. A man's reason inclined him towards a certain office, and the application of his reason to that office meant that it underwent further changes that tailored its nature: through ‘Use and Exercise’ reason was ‘habituated’ to a ‘particular Subject’, and it was this process that made one ‘a Philosopher, a Politician’, or more significantly, ‘a Lawyer’.Footnote 47 The obvious consequence was that training in one office was no preparation for another, and this fact explained why two men who might have attained an equal ‘perfection of the reasoning Facultie’ in relation to their respective offices could not ‘Expect an equall aptitude and perfection in each oth[e]rs Science or art’.Footnote 48
Hale's point was that Hobbes's Phylosopher was overstepping the bounds of his office when attempting to instruct common lawyers in the exercise of their office. The claim that the common law was subordinate to philosophy was untrue because they were distinct and non-overlapping offices grounded in divergent skills. Hobbes had cast his argument in the rhetoric of office, as he sought to limit the scope of judicial action; Hale's emphasis on office was even sharper, forming an account in which no office was subsumable by another because arts of reasoning were attached to office, foreclosing the possibility that one office could claim to comprehend the reason of another. Notice how jarring this is for political theory, as we tend to understand it today: the permeability of distinct domains of life and reasoning with respect to each other is a precondition for the sallies that political theorists make into diverse fields, spurred by their abstract arts of reasoning.Footnote 49 An early, eighteenth-century version of this move will be examined in the following section.
Perhaps the defining move in Hale's rebuttal of Hobbes was his claim that judicial office was particularly impenetrable to those outside it, contra Hobbes's Phylosopher who could speak for the law. The common law was so difficult to habituate one's reason to because of its content: it consisted of ‘particulars’ that made any certainty in law impossible. Although most people might have some ‘Notion of Just and fitt’, agreement was impossible on how such notions were to be understood when applied to given cases, where it was rare to ‘finde a Co[m]mon Consent or agreem[en]t’.Footnote 50 Hale scorned Hobbes's approach of seeking to define justice through reference to Aristotle, accusing him of relying on ‘abstract Notions touching Justice’ that would create ‘Instability, uncertaintie and varietie’.Footnote 51 Tellingly for the argument here, it is at this point that we do find Hale using the word ‘Theoryes’ to negatively redescribe Hobbes's approach. Considering the experience necessary for judicial office, Hale claimed that those with ‘Experience in Humane affaires and Conversation’ could make ‘good Judges’, while philosophers were ‘most Co[m]monly the worst Judges that can be’ because they ignored ‘Ordinary Measures of right and wrong’ for ‘Speculacons Theoryes and distinctions’.Footnote 52 ‘Theoryes’ was simply Hale's improvised dysphemism for abstract thought.
In summary, Hobbes had held that the history of the law revealed a history of laws made by kings, but Hale disagreed. Rather than a unitary origin for all laws, Hale claimed that laws could either be created by king or parliament, or through the absorption of customary practices into the common law through judicial declaration.Footnote 53 This account gave considerable discretion to judicial office in the law-making process, and grounded the office in sources beyond the voice of the monarch; Hobbes's account of the relative powers of judicial and sovereign office had hinged on a hierarchical relationship in which judicial office enforced the sovereign's laws. Hale conceded that in England the king possessed a ‘Soveraigne Power’, but one subject to ‘Qualifications’ established by the judiciary.Footnote 54 Judicial office thus included the policing of the limits of sovereign office, the enforcing of the bounds of the king's official capacities. As Hobbes had specified the operation of judicial engagements with the sovereign, so did Hale, but for a contradictory purpose. All of this concerned the nature of the sovereign office.Footnote 55
II
Attention now turns to the first defence of the political theorist as a named persona with a recognizable set of capacities that distinguished their intellectual conduct from others. It was called forth by Burke's attack on theory and his construction of an appropriate comportment for legislators towards existing law, itself a variation on common law thought.Footnote 56 In short, Burke feared the impact of the French Revolution on Britain, the dangers of which he saw expressed in Richard Price's sermon ‘On the love of our country’.Footnote 57 Price had delivered his sermon late in 1789, and Burke read the published version early the following year. According to Burke, Price misrepresented the Glorious Revolution of 1688 so that he could conflate it with the French Revolution of 1789. The nerve of Burke's factual rejection of Price's account is that what 1688 truly represented was an act of ‘necessity’ – a tolerable departure from the established principle of hereditary monarchy in order to preserve the Protestant church and state. The crucial point of Burke's counter-narrative was that the Glorious Revolution did not establish popular sovereignty because the existing political nation was not ‘dissolved’ but merely ‘regenerated’.Footnote 58 This was the key to all reform: to cleave to precedent.Footnote 59 For those committed to political theory as a rival approach to identifying the need and means for reform, such as James Mackintosh and Dugald Stewart, Burke's account was unacceptable. The key point to be made in what follows is the intensely parochial and contingent nature of this encounter, for Mackintosh and Stewart both spent considerable energy redefining the key terms of debate – ‘theory’, ‘practice’, and ‘experience’. It will emerge that the figure of the ‘political theorist’ was largely a precipitate of this definitional contest.
Burke's position entailed an absolute rejection of the intellectual practice of positing natural rights independently of the history of the society that was to secure them:
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom…as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.Footnote 60
Britain's Jacobins were guilty on this point, discussing rights upon principles alone, thus foreclosing on the experience of generations. Such a time scale was needed to form political knowledge because of the slow absorption of any change.Footnote 61 In consequence, the development of utopian schemes represented an inappropriate relationship to time, understood as both a constraint and instrument of administration. The other failing to which political speculators were exposed was theoretical enthusiasm, an ethical failing that would come to be detected in the leading practitioners of the ‘science of politics’.Footnote 62
The idea that succumbing to enthusiasm was an ethical failing is a key feature of the context that is easily lost to view, along with the fact that it was substitutable for ‘love of theory’ and the ‘spirit of system’: we have no equivalent accusation today, and ‘enthusiasm’ has reversed its charge to be a positive quality. But in his context, Burke was completely intelligible when he wrote that speculators could become seized by a ‘spirit of innovation’ and ‘heated with their theories’.Footnote 63 As we will see, these maladies were understood not in epistemological terms, but in relation to deep cultural presumptions regarding ethical self-government. In developing his negative account of abstract political speculation, Burke identified additional moral failings that accompanied a love of theory. One was political hypocrisy, as seen in those republicans who became courtiers.Footnote 64 A closely related character flaw was to be indifferent to the real benefits of settled government, an indifference made possible by the pleasing nature of an imagined utopia.Footnote 65 A final moral deficiency that made speculators ill-suited to the work of government was that their moral sentiments were deformed. As a leading example of this degradation, Burke noted that early in 1789 the representatives sent to France's Estates General were instructed merely to broach the topic of reforming the architecture of government; the idea of tearing down the existing arrangements for ‘the erection of a theoretic experimental edifice in its place’ would have been greeted with horror.Footnote 66 But the effect of wild politics was to ‘temper and harden the breast’, preparing it for the drastic actions necessary to usher in a new society.Footnote 67
These ethical failings made the heated theorist a poor officer of reform and government. This leads us to ask of Burke: what were the qualities and reasoning techniques possessed by the good reformer? Much of his answer flowed from the premise that the work of government was primarily a technical and practical affair, not normative or theoretical: if you want to keep a man well-fed and healthy, you seek counsel from the farmer and the physician, not the metaphysician.Footnote 68 As with Hale, there is here a rejection of an expansive form of reason that could subsume practical knowledge, and there is also an embrace of a version of Hale's ‘habituated’ reason that was directed to particular arts, in Burke's case, via the notion of a second nature crafted by education and habits.Footnote 69 Human nature was formed by time and custom, and by the stations that people held, and all of this was to be treated by the legislator as materials of government.
Mackintosh did not offer an explicit defence of the ‘political theorist’, but he did answer Burke in his Vindiciae Gallicae (1791) by defending the place of ‘theory’ in the ‘political science’ that was to serve legislators.Footnote 70 Mackintosh began by noting that the National Assembly had been accused of rejecting ‘the guidance of experience, of having abandoned themselves to the illusion of theory, and of having sacrificed great and attainable good to the magnificent chimeras of ideal excellence’.Footnote 71 If such an accusation were true, then the National Assembly would indeed have been beyond defence. But that the accusation was false could be seen once the meaning of ‘experience’ was clarified.
This is an especially clear case of an intellectual contest hinging on definitional combat. In general terms, Mackintosh and the supporters of the revolution needed to diminish the rhetorical force that Burke enjoyed by portraying the champions of abstract theory as departing from experience and, if possible, garner something of the term's legitimizing power for his own argument.Footnote 72 Mackintosh's gambit was to develop two definitions, one suited for each rhetorical task. Experience, he claimed, ought to be regarded in a ‘double view’, yielding ‘models, or principles’.Footnote 73 A model was an ideal to be imitated, as when an existing machine was reproduced, while a principle disclosed the regular, inner workings of something, such as a watch or an institution of government. With these definitions in hand, Mackintosh blunted the accusation of departing from experience. Following an existing model was indeed adhering to experience, one that foreclosed all improvement, such that ‘the first visionary innovator was the savage who built a cabin, or covered himself with a rug’.Footnote 74 Burke's adherence to custom and precedent was here being associated with barbarity.
More important for Mackintosh, however, was the second definition of experience because it allowed him to align his political science with experience. Mackintosh exploited the tight semantic relationship between ‘experiment’ and ‘experience’ that existed at the time by treating history as a series of experiments that disclosed ‘experimentally’ which institutions were good, which bad, and which both good and bad but susceptible of improvement; in view of the availability of such ‘experience liberal and enlightened’ it was absurd to follow Burke's counsel and simply sit contented with an existing social order that was ‘the produce of chance’.Footnote 75
It should be clear that this amounted to a complete rejection of the ethos that Burke had recommended for legislators. In fact, Mackintosh portrayed Burke as someone who had been left behind by history, hence Burke's ‘abhorrence for abstract politics, a predilection for aristocracy, and a dread of innovation’, which led him to misperceive the tremendous progress at hand as nothing more than ‘transient madness’.Footnote 76 It was exactly such fears that Mackintosh's political science was designed to combat, by using experience to discern the principles that governed peoples and governments, allowing legislators to ‘hazard a bolder navigation’ and transform government with ‘the work of legislative intellect’.Footnote 77 For the argument being developed here, the key point is that Mackintosh's defence of theory proceeded by reprogramming the arts of reasoning and ethos of the legislator, above all, by redefining experience such that the science of politics could embrace reform and yet be insulated from the charge of theoretical enthusiasm. In other words, this is a defensive account of theory, and one tied to the office of politician or legislator.
Before turning to Stewart, it is important to note Mackintosh's change of tack in his Discourse on the law of nature and nations (1799), published as an introduction to lectures that he gave at Lincoln's Inn on the topic in 1799–1800. The text was Mackintosh's public affirmation of a reassessment that had been earlier signalled by an apology to Burke, and his discourse included an attack on his former friend William Godwin, along with an endorsement of Burkean prudence.Footnote 78 Mackintosh did not eject theory from the legislator's craft, but it was demoted in favour of history, and its services were shifted from legitimating boldness to inculcating caution. Regarding a nation's constitution, it was now presented as arising and growing with the character and circumstances of a people, and thus as something that could not be fashioned overnight using human wisdom alone, and the attempt to do so was always harmful.Footnote 79
On this point, Mackintosh avowed that it was the simplification of intricate constitutional history and practice to the ‘system of the theorist’, with an air of conclusiveness, that led to the idea of violently reforming constitutions, a constant source of ‘political error’.Footnote 80 Nevertheless, a constitution could be ‘reduced to theory’, but the effect would be to reveal the constitution's delicacy and the limits of theory.Footnote 81 Mackintosh, it would seem, was drawn back from theory in the more general process that occurred in Britain following The Terror (1793–4), and by private calculations regarding his own career. What is interesting is the way the reorientation was conducted – at issue was still the ethos and reasoning apparatus of the legislator.
An important divergence from this pattern is apparent in the riposte to Burke that Dugald Stewart developed in his Elements of the philosophy of the human mind (1792). Where Burke had insisted that abstract theory was bad for legislators, and Mackintosh that it was not, in Stewart an interposing figure emerges, the ‘political theorist’ or ‘speculative philosopher’ who would enlighten the conduct of statesmen. This figure was trained in demanding ethical exercises that would protect them from succumbing to enthusiasm. It is likely that this difference between Mackintosh and Stewart reflects the different composition histories of their texts – Mackintosh's pamphlet was written in response to another pamphlet, while Stewart's text emerged from his teaching moral philosophy to the children of Edinburgh's elite as a means for governing their minds and hence their conduct.Footnote 82 In consequence, the ethical failures that troubled Burke were explicitly targeted by Stewart's psychagogical disciplines. The political theorist thus emerges as possessing a special ethico-intellectual skill set that made it possible to engage in abstract thought regarding political society and its improvement with safety.
Stewart distinguished the political theorist from the Burkean ‘political empiric’ by underlining the former's ability to withdraw from the superstition of precedent and experience – which involved a conflation of association and causation – and formulate generalizations.Footnote 83 In making this case, Stewart deflected Burke's attacks on abstract thought by showing that they related to by-products of the ill-government of one or more of the mind's faculties. It was true that the mind could become heated by theory, but it was a malady attaching to certain identifiable strains. A leading instance was those Platonists who presumed to perceive essences when, in fact, what their minds produced was phantasms, absurdities, and facts mixed with metaphysics.Footnote 84 The needed remedy was to limit investigation to objects that lay within the powers of human conception, and in this regard the remodelling of ‘physics’ in the manner of Bacon was exemplary.Footnote 85
In relation to politics, the task faced some additional difficulties because of the nature of the objects to be investigated. At this point, Stewart's nominalism set some key limits because it stipulated that the use of signs was essential to the operation of human reason.Footnote 86 The referents of a proposition consequently became as important to secure as the relations between the propositions, as did ‘other intellectual processes’ distinct from reasoning or ‘deduction, properly so called’.Footnote 87 Perhaps the most important art that Stewart elaborated in this context was ‘application’. In algebra, for example, even the best exponents of calculus could fall into paradox and absurdity by failing to regard the conditions that a hypothesis involved: in a vacuum, a cannonball and feather would fall at the same speed, but we do not live in vacuums. Geometry was largely protected against this danger because diagrams could act as a check on reasoning by revealing to the senses the relations that hold between the quantities being investigated.Footnote 88 In the non-mathematical sciences, the role of diagrams must be fulfilled by examples and illustrations.Footnote 89
Stewart accordingly prescribed the discipline of illustrating elaborate claims and argumentation with cases or examples as a safeguard. Another precaution was to reason using general terms, the meaning of which was fixed by accurate definition and made familiar through force of habit. By using general terms, a person could also avoid the danger of being distracted by their own experiences, or by the arousal of the imagination, and this held out the promise of discovering ‘comprehensive theorems’ by combining general terms in the prescribed manner.Footnote 90 Of course, this style of reflection was exactly what Burke sought to suppress, and it is unlikely that Stewart's disciplines would have assuaged him. Yet Stewart's defence consisted of more than ethical disciplines, for he was able to deploy his philosophy of mind to set out an account of abstraction as a constituent faculty of human reason. Hence, what Burke had feared as corrosive to good reasoning was revealed to be inescapable.
Stewart made this point by denying that it was possible to isolate constitutional traditions and then treat them as the determining factor of public happiness, as Burke had done. The leading difficulty was the multitude of other circumstances that simultaneously operated in a society – including ideas, manners, the character of the people, and relations between orders of the society – that also played a role and fed into each other in complex patterns. Faced with the wealth of details and processes, the only remedy was to produce ‘systematical descriptions’ of societies that worked rather like the general rules of grammar – simplifying and organizing the materials to be studied. If such descriptions were to be called ‘theory’, then it was simply the case that ‘every such description must necessarily be more or less theoretical’, since every description was partial compared to the abundance of particulars.Footnote 91
This was true not only in politics but in all spheres of technical skill; brilliantly reversing Burke's farmer and physician trope, Stewart insisted that the farmer worked with only a few categories of soil, while physicians postulated a small number of temperaments; farmers and physicians performed abstraction in their practical arts.Footnote 92 Or, to put the same point the other way, handling general principles was a practical skill acquired through experience. It followed that Burke's opposition between theory and practice was false and that the relevant distinction was between those who proceeded ‘cautiously and philosophically’ and those who held an ‘unenlightened veneration for maxims which are supposed to have the sanction of time in their favour’.Footnote 93 Abstraction was inescapable, hence theory was too.
Abstraction could be conducted safely when the faculties of the human mind were understood, along with the risks that came with their operation. In this regard, Stewart conceded that the beauty to be found in theoretical schemas could lead to overindulgence in abstraction and neglect of the particular.Footnote 94 More serious was the tendency to join the ranks of the ‘Utopian projectors’ who would sacrifice civic tranquillity for reform,Footnote 95 and this would seem to be threatened by Mackintosh's counsel to ‘hazard a bolder navigation’. But here, the remedy was patience and prudence, such that Burke's ‘enthusiasm’Footnote 96 and ‘fanaticism’Footnote 97 emerged as merely the ‘rash application of general principles’.Footnote 98 The intellectual pathologies that Burke feared could be dealt with by the moral philosophy curriculum, which would produce the disciplined and steady mind needed to give scientific counsel to legislators. In this account, the political theorist is a servant of that old figure – the prince/sovereign/legislator – but their pretensions to science and enlightenment stretch the category of ‘counsel’ to its uttermost limits. Put differently, and as others have suggested, setting out a similar vision today would likely bring the charge of technocracy.Footnote 99
III
That Stewart expended considerable effort to acknowledge and contain the failings of those who produced political theory points to the thrust of this article: that the political theorist's first appearance was both defensive and flickering, having been called forth by the peculiar circumstances of 1790s Britain. The defensive posture continued in the following decades, no doubt because Britain's inward-looking and alarmed response to the revolution in France far outlived the revolutionary government. If we glance ahead to Jeremy Bentham's Book of fallacies (1824), for example, then it is instructive to note that his list of the leading terms in the ‘anti-rational’ vocabulary that had held back the tide of reform included ‘theoretical’, while ‘practice’ was deployed to defend the status quo.Footnote 100 This suggests that, from Burke to Bentham at least, political theory was still fighting for its place in the British mind. This claim is supported by the fact that it is difficult to find the phrase ‘political theorist’ being used positively in the decades following the French Revolution.Footnote 101 The terms ‘theory’ and ‘theorist’ did better, partly because they were both cultivated within political economy as labels to distinguish the intellectual skills of Malthus and Ricardo from their ‘practical’ opponents.Footnote 102 All of this warrants hypothesizing that the process by which political theory gained its place was slow, and that it will rarely be appropriate to use the term before c. 1800, and considerable caution will still be necessary when using the label in the post-1800 period. In this regard, it is salutary to remember that the first chair of politics in Britain was the Gladstone Professorship of Political Theory and Institutions, established in Oxford University in 1912.Footnote 103
In addition to signalling the need for caution with respect to historiographical vocabulary, the lateness of political theory also points to two promising areas of research. The first concerns how political theory worked in the nineteenth century, when it may have been addressed to an officeholder. A potential resource for this work will be studies of casuistical reasoning, recently shown by Conal Condren, Ian Hunter, and others to have had a pervasive and prolonged existence, permitting the suspicion that further discoveries will be made deep into the nineteenth century.Footnote 104 In fact, such a lingering presence was suggested long ago by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin in their classic study.Footnote 105 At present, however, we know little of this style of thought, largely because we prefer to write the history of political theory in the nineteenth century and after as a story of ‘isms’.Footnote 106
The second underexplored topic represents the reverse side of the coin: the process by which the addressee of political theory changed from officeholders to all rational persons, or, humanity in general. Of course, rational persons were a standard argumentative device in early modern argumentation – in natural law, for example – and ‘humanity’ was both an object of thought and an addressee for Christian metaphysicians such as Kant. But the process by which either was elevated to the addressee of a field called ‘political theory’ is less well understood. One indispensable tool in this investigation will be J. G. A. Pocock's early advice to study acts of abstraction as phenomena occurring in historical time.Footnote 107 The historical debate over the desirability of conducting political reflection at high levels of abstraction – as between Burke and Stewart – would then stand as a second-order discourse that historians can recover along with its interaction with first-order discourses organized around virtues, rights, classes, and so on. Such recovery of second-order talk could prove less antiquarian than might be thought, since political theory's flight up the ladder of abstraction has had important and unpredictable effects. John Rawls, for example, has defended his ‘idealized…abstract, conceptions of society and person’ as necessary to reveal ‘how citizens themselves might, on due reflection, want to conceive of their society’.Footnote 108 Yet the recondite demands of Rawls's ‘due reflection’ can only be comprehended by professional philosophers, and then with difficulty.Footnote 109 Today's field of political theory is attempting to come to terms with this feature of its current practice and mitigate its negative effects using its own tools, such as making ‘realism’ an epistemological value.Footnote 110 This is rather like curing abstraction with abstraction, and one can only hope that a historical perspective will provide better medicine.
