Schools of Thought

Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science

Joan Wallach Scott, Debra Keates, Joan Wallach Scott, Debra Keates

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691228389
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Schools of Thought brings together a cast of prominent scholars to assess, with unprecedented breadth and vigor, the intellectual revolution over the past quarter century in the social sciences. This collection of twenty essays stems from a 1997 conference that celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science. The authors, who represent a wide range of disciplines, are all associated with the School's emphasis on interpretive social science, which rejects models from the hard sciences and opts instead for a humanistic approach to social inquiry.
Following a preface by Clifford Geertz, whose profound insights have helped shape the School from the outset, the essays are arranged in four sections. The first offers personal reflections on disciplinary changes; the second features essays advocating changes in focus or methodology; the third presents field overviews and institutional history; while the fourth addresses the link between political philosophy and world governance. Two recurring themes are the uses (and pitfalls) of interdisciplinary studies and the relation between scholarship and social change. This book will be rewarding for anyone interested in how changing trends in scholarship shape the understanding of our social worlds.
The contributors include David Apter, Kaushik Basu, Judith Butler, Nicholas Dirks, Jean Elshtain, Peter Galison, Wolf Lepenies, Jane Mansbridge, Andrew Pickering, Mary Poovey, Istvan Rev, Renato Rosaldo, Michael Rustin, Joan W. Scott, William H. Sewell, Jr., Quentin Skinner, Charles Taylor, Anna Tsing, Michael Walzer, and Gavin Wright.

PART ONE

Blurred Genres: Reflections on Disciplinary Practices

CHAPTER 1

Political Theory after the Enlightenment Project

Quentin Skinner

THIS ESSAY was originally presented at a conference honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. When revising it for the less celebratory occasion of this collection, I discovered that to excise all specific references to the School of Social Science at the Institute would do damage to the view of changes in my field that I, in fact, hold. The small size of the school belies its enormous influence; I hope I shall be forgiven for leaving my references to it intact.

• • •

I HAVE been asked to say something specifically about changes in the study of political theory during the past quarter of a century. But I must begin by explaining that I am not myself a first-order political theorist but merely (or at least mainly) an historian of the subject. I revere the talents of such political philosophers as Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor; they have shown us how to combine historical scholarship with fundamental philosophical enquiry into the concepts and assumptions that shape our contemporary political world. By contrast, I have mainly confined myself to tracing some of the processes by which our contemporary political world came into being. Were I to try to say anything about that world itself, I would I think have little hope—especially in the face of such a dauntingly well-informed audience—of telling you anything you don’t already know or, alternatively, don’t already know to be strongly contestable.

This being so, what I should like to do instead is to invite you for a moment to enter the particular neck of the academic woods in which I live and move. I inhabit a province remote in space and time from the United States today, so I hope it will not strike you as merely alien and strange. It is far removed in space, in that I am a student exclusively of western European traditions of reflection about political life. And it is still further removed in time, in that I am a student of the European tradition only during its most formative days, which I take to have been the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries.

My focus in what follows will, however, be somewhat broader than these limitations may suggest. Taking this admittedly narrow perspective, what I plan to do is to look at two massive social and political movements that have both been accelerating during the past twenty-five years. One has been the feminist movement, the diversified but continuing progress of which profoundly affects us all. I am not, of course, going to say anything about this movement itself, but I do want to say something about the transforming influence it has exercised on the academic subdiscipline within which I work.

True to my desire to welcome you into my corner of the Academy, I should like to examine this influence in the case of one specific topic on which I have myself tried to write, namely the moral and political theory of Renaissance Europe. Let me begin by casting my mind back twenty-five years and asking what scholarly studies would have been widely regarded in the early 1970s as classic contributions to this particular subject. A small number of works stand out, but one that would undoubtedly have been cited by every expert in the field would have been the study that Felix Gilbert published in 1965, when he was already a member of the School of Historical Studies here at the Institute, a post from which he retired in 1975. I am referring to his book Machiavelli and Guicciardini in which he provided an analysis, as his subtitle puts it, of politics and history in sixteenth-century Florence.

As Gilbert emphasised, one of the pivotal concepts around which the political theory of the Renaissance was organized was that of virtue—virtus in Latin, la virtù in Italian. As he also indicated, however, this concept was not employed merely to refer, as it later was in the philosophy of Kant and his followers, to a range of allegedly desirable qualities. It is true that the term virtus was used in the Renaissance as a shorthand for the so-called cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. But I take it to have been part of Gilbert’s thesis to argue that there had been an excessive readiness, perhaps especially prevalent in the German historiography, to read the political theory of the Renaissance through the lens later supplied by Kant, thereby failing to see that the concept of virtus had previously borne a much more complex and potentially ambiguous character. One of the insights to be gained from Gilbert’s contrasting analysis is that, among Renaissance political writers, the concept was also used as the name of a distinctive causal power. To cite the ambiguity we still invoke when speaking of the virtues, it was taken to be the name of the power by virtue of which we are alone capable of attaining our highest and most characteristically human goals.

If we ask about the nature of those goals, we find ourselves led to speak, Gilbert went on to show, about some of the most profound and defining values of Renaissance culture. The specific ends that the political theorists of this era invite us to pursue are those of attaining honor and fame for ourselves and our community by way of seeking glory in the public sphere. This sphere was in turn taken to include the theater of war as well as politics, and the question whether civil or military glory should be assigned the higher value continued to be debated throughout the bloodstained history of Renaissance Europe.

With this portrait of the virtuoso, we are presented with a vision of morality as a series of hypothetical imperatives, and hence in effect as a practical skill. We are asked to become adept at reasoning about the relations between individual virtues and our chosen goals, learning how to calculate on each particular occasion which particular quality of virtù will best enable us to achieve what we desire. At the same time, we are offered a powerful explanation of why we have an interest in behaving morally. If and only if we learn to act virtuously, it is suggested, can we hope to attain the goals that, as a matter of fact, we chiefly desire.

Felix Gilbert’s account of Renaissance virtù was a study of exceptional subtlety, and in many ways it remains an unsurpassed guide to the very different moral terrain traversed by Machiavelli and his contemporaries. But at the same time Gilbert’s analysis contained a lacuna that now seems astonishing. Although he wrote so perceptively about virtus as the name of a causal power, he made little of the fact that virtus was also viewed by the neoclassical writers of the Renaissance as the eponymous attribute of the figure known as the vir. And when the moralists of the Renaissance spoke of the vir, what they were referring to—as our own word virile is there to remind us—was the figure of the truly manly man.

Once we add this ingredient, the organizing categories of Renaissance political theory jump to life with a vengeance. Let me single out two specific implications of this way of thinking about the moral and political world. The first stems from the claim that the exercise of virtus presupposes a capacity for sustained practical reasoning. When we add to this the claim that virtus is the quality of the vir, we find ourselves confronting a syllogism of which the conclusion affirms that reason is an inherently male attribute. Nowadays the implications for the gendering of public life hardly need spelling out. But I know of no historical study that brought these implications fully to the surface before Genevieve Lloyd published her pioneering book The Man of Reason in 1984. As she indicated, it was at the historical juncture of which I have been speaking that the opposition began to be constructed between the preempted male quality of rationality and the supposedly contrasting ideal of feminine intuition. Once this distinction took firm root, male domination of the public sphere came to be seen as nothing less than a part of the natural order of things.

The other implication I want to single out is arguably of even greater importance. The quality of virtus, according to the ideology I am here considering, is the name of the congeries of attributes required for success in political life. Once again, however, virtus is at the same time held to be a specifically male set of qualities. But these premises yield the conclusion that women inherently lack the attributes requisite for operating effectively in the public sphere. It is, of course, acknowledged that they may have appropriate goals of their own, and thus that an ideal of female virtus can undoubtedly be assigned a sense. But at the same time it is argued that the only appropriate arena for the display of such virtus must be private and domestic, by contrast with the specifically male domain of politics. Again, the implications for the gendering of public life hardly need spelling out. But I know of no historical study that brought them center stage before the publication of Jean Elshtain’s book Public Man, Private Woman, a study I recall as eye-opening in the literal sense when it first appeared in 1981.

I have mentioned some pioneering contributions of feminist scholarship to the intellectual history of the Renaissance. If I had been speaking about the nineteenth century, however, I should certainly have wanted to mention the work published at the same time by Joan Scott here at the Institute. But whatever historical period we examine, the moral of the story remains the same. No one writing the history of political theory, nor any other kind of intellectual history, would nowadays write with the kind of blinkered vision that limited even the most perceptive historians of a generation ago. The impact of feminist scholarship has transfigured the intellectual landscape. Everyone has been given the means to see how far these intellectual traditions were also discourses of power, discourses that served to legitimize certain hierarchical arrangements, to marginalize conflicting possibilities and thereby to hold in place a pervasively masculine construction of the social and political world.

• • •

I NOW turn to the other social and political movement of recent years whose impact on my corner of the Academy I want to discuss. The transformation I have in mind here might be called, in defiance of Max Weber, the reenchantment of the world. Again, this is proving to be something of a global phenomenon, but in this case it is even more important for me to stress that I view it only from the standpoint of western Europe.

I am partly thinking of the growing sense that there are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamt of in the philosophies inherited from the Enlightenment. An increasing number of people assure us, at least in Great Britain, that Western medicine is an oppressive fraud; that they have been abducted by aliens; that they know for a fact that there is a prehistoric monster living in Loch Ness. They go on to demand our respect for these and a range of comparable beliefs that would have been widely and confidently stigmatized a quarter of a century ago as little better than magical in character.

This is sufficiently interesting in itself. But I am more concerned with an explicitly political movement that might appear, from the point of view of an apostle of the Enlightenment, to have some connections with the evidently increasing prevalence of such beliefs. I am thinking of the drift toward the whole-scale rejection of the values of the modern secular state in the name of religious faith, something that would, I think, have seemed almost unimaginable only twenty-five years ago. We are now witnessing, at least in Europe, the utter breakdown of the liberal consensus whereby religious belief was considered to be paradigmatically a private matter. The world religions, in Europe as in the Middle East, are instead seeking once more to seize the political arena as the best means of furthering their own purposes.

The most obvious example is usually taken to be that of Islam. The rule of the Mullahs continues in Iran, while a fundamentalist Islamic government was in 1996 democratically installed in Ankara. I have promised, however, to limit myself to unequivocally European instances, and there it is hard to avoid reflecting on the continuing rivalries between different versions of the Christian faith. The divisions between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity undoubtedly played some role in the recent tragedy in Bosnia, while the struggles between the Protestant and Catholic Churches continue to separate the communities in Ireland. Let me add one further example that, from my point of view, is even closer to home. The Saudi Arabian ambassador to London stated in an interview early in 1997 that one of the gravest mistakes made by Europeans was ever to believe that the march of civilization depends on the withdrawal of religion from public life. It is obvious, he declared, that civilizations decline as soon as they cease to organize their common life around a shared religious faith.

Among contemporary political philosophers, Charles Taylor has been one of the leading students of the relations between religion and multiculturalism, and I hope he may have something further to say about these crucial questions today. But in the meantime, the point I wish to make is similar to the one I made before. The increasing prominence and fervent commitment of these religious confessions is changing the sensibility of us all. It is even changing the sensibility of those who, like myself, remain so much the children of the Enlightenment that, in our Weltanschauung, all the world religions appear more or less equally magical in character. This in turn is having the effect of altering not merely how we think about our own political world, but also how as cultural historians we approach and write about the religious life of the past.

To illustrate my point, let me take, as before, an example from the field in which I work. One of the books I wrote while I was here at the Institute in the 1970s was a study of the ideologies underlying the religious wars of post-Reformation Europe, especially in France. Suppose that, as before, I cast my mind back to the period when I was writing that book, and ask myself what scholarly works were regarded at that time as classic contributions to that particular theme. One study that would, I think, have been cited by everyone would have been Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s two-volume work, Les paysans de Languedoc, originally published in 1966 and translated into English in 1974 (Les paysans de Languedoc [Paris: Mouton, 1966]; The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974]). This was widely hailed, a quarter of a century ago, as the most important investigation of social conflicts and popular religious mentalités in the era centring on the Reformation. I recall Bob Darnton telling me (when I first met him here at the Institute in 1974) that he thought it the greatest historical work of the age.

One of the phenomena that interested Ladurie was the increasing prevalence of witchcraft beliefs in the half-century following the Reformation. What, he asked, could account for this feature of what he called “the peasant consciousness”? Ladurie opened his analysis by assuring us that the beliefs to be explained—including as they did the claim that witches swore homage to the Devil incarnate—were of course false, and amounted to little more than “demonic superstitions.” But Ladurie went much further, adding that the beliefs in question were not merely mistaken but were such that no one could ever have had adequate grounds for holding them. They were an instance of “mass delirium,” a reflection of “a surge of obscurantism.” They belonged to a period in which the peasants were “slipping savagely back into the irrational” in thought and action alike.

When Ladurie turns to ask what might account for this feature of the peasant mentalité, he accordingly takes himself to be looking for a strongly causal form of explanation. As he sees it, the historical task is that of discovering what social conditions could have affected the peasantry and their leaders in such a way that, as he puts it, “the peasant consciousness suddenly broke loose from its moorings” and “fell prey to the ancient deliriums.”

One explanation Ladurie suggests is that, at the time of the Reformation, many people in remote areas felt abandoned by their spiritual mentors and expressed their resulting terrors in a displaced form. “Far from their priests, the peasants found themselves alone with their anxieties and their primordial fears—and abandoned themselves to Satan.” But Ladurie’s controlling hypothesis is that the peasants felt collectively frustrated at the failure of the Reformation to improve their lot. Due to their lack of “an enlightened elite” with “a modern conception of man,” they found themselves unable to engineer any “reasonable confrontations” with the privileged orders of society. As a consequence, their hope of bettering themselves was forced to take on a “mythical dress” and finally to express itself in “demonic forms of escape.”

Ladurie’s study may have been viewed as a classic work a quarter of a century ago, but any historian or ethnographer who nowadays wrote about popular religion in this way would I think be fortunate not to be run out of town. As I have intimated, one basic reason is surely that the children of the Enlightenment, among whom Ladurie clearly numbers himself, have been obliged in the meantime to come to terms with multiculturalism as a cognitive as well as a political force. They have been obliged to recognize that a number of present-day beliefs which they might feel inclined to dismiss as no less obscurantist than the belief in witchcraft are not only held by millions of people with passionate sincerity, but are proving capable of mobilizing political forces strong enough to pull down principalities and powers.

This is not to say that I wish to offer you a socially reductionist argument to the effect that our changing experiences necessarily transform our sensibilities. On the contrary, it is always possible to insist on holding on to our existing theories more or less in spite of everythi...