In his latest work, Gary Browning highlights an issue that is often ignored or downplayed in standard histories of political thought. Many scholars, focusing on a more or less consensual canon of authors, works and doctrines, many scholars regard the history of political philosophy as a succession of fixed objects to be conveyed by a disinterested observer. This attitude is usually grounded in a vast and often inexplicit series of assumptions: it entails, for example, a specific interpretation of which texts are to count as relevant and worthy of analysis, of how their main theses are to be identified and understood, of the extent to which their authors’ original intentions are relevant for the determination of their meaning, of the extent to which the historical and biographical context in which they were written conditions their final message, etc. Bringing all of these issues to the fore, Browning’s reading of the history of modern political philosophy is not so much an interpretation of past authors and doctrines as an interpretation of the different interpretations they have elicited. His main purpose is to show that the history of political thought is not a neutral undertaking, but a complex web of interpretations, shaped by different contexts and aims.
The book’s first main section reviews six ‘interpretive schemes’ developed by a string of well-known political theorists: Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectical approach to the history of political ideas; the historical approach favoured by Oakeshott and Collingwood; the contextualism championed by Quentin Skinner and the so-called Cambridge School; the deconstructivism of Derrida; Foucault’s metadiscursive analyses; and Gadamer’s hermeneutical explorations. These general schemes are then applied, in the book’s second main section, to a wide selection of modern political thinkers, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bentham, Mill, Nietzsche and de Beauvoir. In these chapters, the author provides a very brief description of each philosopher’s life, writings and main political ideas, followed by an overview of some of the most relevant interpretive attitudes associated with his or her work. Although this exercise is not exhaustive, it succeeds in bringing out the versatility inherent to most of the doctrines under consideration. Instead of a ‘canonical’ Hegel or a ‘canonical’ Marx, for example, Hegelianism and Marxism are viewed from a variety of interpretive angles, which favour different texts, aims and methodologies, offering thereby very different versions of the same basic ideas. Simultaneously, the degree of resistance put up by Hegel’s and Marx’s writings to these different schemes is also indicative of the latter’s strengths and weaknesses, which reflect back on the work of their main proponents.
In the chapter devoted to Hegel’s interpretive scheme, the author offers a fair and nuanced, albeit overly concise, characterization of Hegel’s conception of the relationship between history and philosophy. On the one hand, he rejects the simple equation between philosophical reason and historical reality often associated with Hegel’s dialectics, as well as the charges of historical determinism levelled against him: ‘If Hegel is an historicist, he is so by virtue of his recognition of historicity as an inescapable dimension of all human activities rather than by framing general laws of historical development’ (32). On the other hand, Browning questions Hegel’s teleological account of the history of philosophy. He criticises Hegel’s assumption that all preceding philosophical stages are directly commensurable with his own, as well as his tendency to overemphasize the homogeneity of past philosophical cultures, in detriment of dissident or marginal ideas and concerns. This line of criticism echoes Gadamer’s indictment of Hegelian teleology, summarized later on in the chapter devoted to Hegel’s political philosophy. This chapter also includes an interesting overview of Marx’s, Oakeshott’s and Collingwood’s engagement with Hegel’s writings.
Marx’s interpretive scheme is considered alongside Hegel’s. Despite his famous rejection of the latter’s idealist framework, he also construed the history of philosophical and political thought in a systematic way, measuring the merits of past political doctrines in light of his own teleological enterprise. Moreover, like Hegel, Marx opposes all forms of utopianism, basing his philosophical analyses on an immanent assessment of existing ideas and realities. Accordingly, Browning extends his criticism of Hegel’s interpretive approach to Marx’s, denouncing the rigidity of his critical framework and its incapacity to accommodate discordant or heterogeneous standpoints. In the author’s own words, both Hegel’s and Marx’s global narratives ‘leave theoretical remainders, which cannot be coerced into their frameworks and which complicate the big pictures, which their schemes maintain’ (43). These limitations are further discussed in the chapter devoted to Marx’s political philosophy, where different views on his work and legacy are briefly compared—from Marxist and Post-Marxist readings of Marx (Kautsky and Lenin, but also Cohen, Hardt and Negri), to Derrida’s reappropriation of Capital and The German Ideology.
The comparative assessment of Hegelianism, Marxism and other interpretive attitudes and traditions is not intended as a contest, designed to single out the best or most accurate one. For Browning, all modes of enquiry are limited and disputable, but all of them offer unique, relevant and productive insights into the history of political thought. To focus on ‘the question of which perspective is true is to misconceive the relativity of our concepts to the questions that we ask and to abstract from perspectival orientation’ (374). Browning’s final aim, however, is not simply to highlight the incommensurability of different interpretive approaches, or the philosophical benefits of interpretive pluralism. He goes on to explore—in what is arguably the book’s most original and interesting point—the possibility of a wider and more inclusive interpretive scheme, developed out of a systematic critique of all preceding lines of enquiry. This possibility, inspired by Hegel’s and Marx’s global enterprises, is discussed throughout the conclusion, where the previous analyses are condensed into a basic set of hermeneutic strategies: the alternative between construction and deconstruction (Gadamer versus Derrida and Foucault); contextualism and decontextualization (Quentin Skinner versus Derrida, among others); teleology and contingency or discontinuity (Hegel and Marx versus Collingwood and Oakeshott). This final inventory is meant to show that all of these alternatives are ultimately dependent on one another. A truly comprehensive interpretive scheme, devoid of ‘theoretical remainders’, must be able, therefore, to criticize and reintegrate all of them, taking care both to respect their differences and to acknowledge their complementarity.
Overall, Browning’s work is sharp and informative, if somewhat over-packed. A vast array of philosophies is confined to a series of relatively brief chapters, which can do no more than outline each thinker’s main ideas. But this macroscopic strategy is in keeping with the book’s design: instead of providing a detailed history of modern political thought, its aim is to highlight the question of interpretation by means of concrete historical examples. The author’s individual analyses can be expanded and challenged in different ways, but his conceptual approach is illuminating and makes new and important demands on future historians and interpreters.
