Alan Ryan, On Politics, a new history of political philosophy, 2 vols., Allen Lane, 2013, pp. 1,114 + xxv
This is a stonker of a book. There are two volumes: Herodotus to Machiavelli, and
Hobbes to the Present; four parts: The Classical Conception, The Christian World, Modernity, and The
World after Marx; twenty-seven chapters and more than a thousand pages. It weighs in at a kilo and a half, close to three pounds in old money. It is, as the author says, ‘a long book and a long time in the making’. Alan Ryan has been teaching political philosophy in the UK and USA since my first year as an undergraduate, (indeed, he taught me in my first year as an undergraduate), and will be known to every reader of this journal. The book presents a life’s reflections on his subject, displaying, in his trademark clear and accessible prose, the scholarship and accumulated knowledge of a master of his subject. It will be read, with profit and enjoyment by a range of audiences, from peers to undergraduates and general readers, seeking guidance and commentary over its long and varied terrain. One cannot overestimate the effort involved in producing this kind of work and the author deserves the respect as well as the thanks of the scholarly community for what he has achieved.
Although this is a real attempt –perhaps the first since Plamenatz’s 1 (who must have taught
Ryan) - to construct a truly comprehensive and continuous historical narrative, it manages to combine that with critical exegesis of the thought of major figures as well as more synthetic treatments of ages and issues characterised by the interaction of lesser thinkers. Thus Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes. Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville and Marx each get their own chapters. Classical Rome, the Medieval World, Humanism, the Reformation,
American Founding, the French Revolution and its critics, etc., comprise chapters in which figure such second division players as Polybius, John of Salisbury, Dante, Marsilius, Bartolus, William of
Ockham, Christine de Pizan, Erasmus, More, Montaigne, Montesquieu Burke etc. Thinkers are approached directly with little direct discussion of scholarship. In part four issues and ‘isms’ prevail, and there are no chapters devoted to individuals. Its final chapter is based around a series of global topics which are the subject of current theorising rather than theories themselves – fundamentalism, nationalism, nuclear deterrence, humanitarian intervention, environmental degradation.
With such a huge cast, decisions about inclusion have to be made with which it would be foolish to cavil; but a few omissions are worth comment. There was no sustained treatment of
Adam Smith or David Hume, major players in a Scottish Enlightenment, the recovery of which has done so much to reshape our view of the eighteenth century. There was the merest mention (in fact two) of Nietzsche, a figure whose influence, however slight in his lifetime, has been massive in
French, and French – influenced Anglophone political philosophy since at least the middle of the last century. In fact the treatment of recent political philosophy is distinctly Anglophone: there is no mention of Habermas, Derrida, or Foucault.
Ryan pays tribute to Berlin and Russel as stylistic models. But the shadow of these two philosophers falls on the status as well as the manner of his work. He is, of course, reflective about
1 Plamenatz’ ‘Man and Society’ 2 vols., (Longman 1963) was originally written as a comprehensive and contextualised account, but the context and minor figures were removed by an over-zealous publisher’s editor publisher. The full text was recovered by Robert Wokler and published in three volumes (1992).

what he is doing. Political theorists, ‘have no doubt that they are engaged in productive if sometimes frustrating, conversations across the centuries with their long-dead predecessors, as well as their contemporaries.’ However true of political theorists as philosophers, it’s not necessarily true of all historians of political thought, many of whom see themselves as seeking to understand theorists without necessarily politically engaging with them. This is not to split methodological hairs.
It goes to the heart of why we study the history of political philosophy, as well as what we do when we do it. Over the course of our two careers, the divide between recovering the historical and intellectual contexts for the better understanding of past political theory and the construction of histories of it, and the critical analysis and fruitful contemporary deployment of the ideas figuring in such histories has become an issue for our subject, institutionally and politically as well as intellectually. If you like labels between a Cambridge (historical) and an Oxford)(Philosophical) approach. Although temperamentally Oxonian Ryan resists this divide, no less than he seems to resist the distinction between the history of political philosophy (the title of the book) and the history of political ideas, or just ‘political theory’ (as it is usually referred to in the text). For him political theory is ‘a mixture of philosophical analysis, moral judgement, constitutional speculation, and practical advice’ I, (117) 2
But what is the History of Political Philosophy? As philosophers who came to write on the history of political philosophy, neither Berlin or Russell were disposed to prioritise the interpretive over the critical; and although Ryan has clearly read into much of the vast literature produced by the
‘historical revolution’ in political theory, there are echoes of both Berlin and Russel in the crisp, appraisive summaries that he finds periodically irresistible (and which make the work so enjoyable).
John of Salisbury’s distinctly low Beta – ish effort was ‘more sensible, less anarchic, and less grim an account of politics than Augustine’s; it is also less intellectually interesting and less morally demanding.’ (221) Aquinas ‘was not by the standards of his day severe or superstitious; he was far from suggesting that Jews might be killed just because they were Jews or because they inherited the taint of those who killed Christ… Nonetheless with his acceptance of slavery and the division of the world into the better- and worse-off, Aquinas demonstrates how easy it is to reconcile the natural equality and freedom of all mankind with the inequalities of the world as we have it.’ I 253-4. Our author is shamelessly proleptic: with Marsilius ‘we are very close to the view of the nature of a church that John Locke argued for in his Letter concerning toleration, 350 years later.’
However bracketed, such intrusions, of modern criteria of judgement and expectations, and of comparison across history with philosophically distinct thinkers can become bewilderingly disconcerting. A reflective passage on Augustine is an extreme instance with Machiavelli, Rousseau,
Cicero, Publius, Hobbes and Locke all jostling for our attention :
‘The “well ordered” republic that Machiavelli and Rousseau longed for was an idealised version of the Republic described by Cicero, and hankered after by the founders of the
American Republic. In Augustine’s discussion, mixed republics are at no particular advantage…any state can be ‘well ordered’ so long as there is peace, agreements are kept laws are observed, and affairs are predictable. Rousseau’s claim that when an absolute monarchy achieves these things, we achieve the silence of the graveyard would have struck
Augustine as romantic nonsense. [His views on non-resistance] are … dangerous [and] at
2 He adds: it is the extreme cases that sharpen the distinction between statecraft and philosophy.’

odds with almost everything other writers have said on the subject. Hobbes… Locke….
Cicero… If Augustine had followed Cicero in arguing that what defines a true state is that it is based on justice … he would have been more plausible, but less original and interesting than he was.’ (I. 180-1)
This feature of the writing is not always this obtrusive, and may be considered a matter of taste - one which some find engaging. But when he gets going it leads the author – as it does in the quoted passage -to some curiously cavalier comments: could anything really have struck Augustine as
‘romantic’ – nonsensical or otherwise? Do we read Augustine for plausibility? And once we understand his characterisation of the state as grounded in its citizen’s ‘loves’ rather than justice – is his view less plausible than Cicero’s? Were Augustine’s views on non-resistence ‘at odds with most writers’ (- of his time? Of ours? Ever?) Surely the enormous personal courage and intellectual effort required and displayed by – for example - John Locke’s argument to the contrary suggests it was
Locke, and not Augustine who was ‘at odds’ with the mainstream – indeed, as Ryan later claims, that is why we study him. (940-1)
But the more generic issue here concerns what this kind of trans-historical comparison may suggest to the ingénu reader. From a pedagogical point of view, one supposes that these chapters will be encountered chronologically; and many readers will not have encountered, much less read, the later writers being invoked to explain or contrast with the earlier subject. What will they then make of such comparisons? Quite apart from how informative they might be to them, the cognitive implication they insinuate in the mind of the acolyte must surely be that ‘resistance’,
‘well ordered-ness’ and ‘natural equality’ are ready-to-hand, trans-historical categories, the deployment of which can be identified in different times by different thinkers, compared, and adjudged to be more or less well or badly done. But for the historian this surely won’t do. For them such categories of political thought (if indeed they are categories for the thinker) are invariably encountered already deployed. For the historian of political philosophy, the interest is not in their likeness or difference to other appearances, but in the way they are embedded in a localised – perhaps unique, and philosophically grounded - discourse which can only then be embedded in a wider historical story.
It’s not clear that this tendency doesn’t affect the author. Granted Filmer’s views are so implausible (to us and Locke) that their purchase needs explaining. But taking seriously Filmer’s
critique of any contractualist grounding of property rights and government (as Locke was forced to) would have yielded a more historical account of why Locke’s political and economic arguments had the shape they did. Although we get a presentist discussion as to whether a supposedly Lockean – indebted liberalism can survive the eclipse of its theological, premise, following through in more detail the implications of Locke’s belief in our obligation to obey natural law (however problematic its philosophical basis) would surely have helped explain why he could be so relaxed about our tacitly consenting to governments who adhered to it.
This in turn is implicated in another major issue, which is the shift from the titular ‘history of political philosophy’ to the ‘history of political theory’ that we get. The work does not lack attention to historical context: on the contrary. We get 32 pages on the Greeks, 26 on the Roman Republic, 11 on the Empire, 35 or so on the early medieval world. But this is socio - political and institutional context , in response to which thoughts were thought, rather than the intellectual or philosophical

presuppositions in which they were embedded. The latter is surely necessary to explain their
philosophical history. Those who want a story about how an epistemology or metaphysics can ground political thinking, or how continuities or discontinuities at this level affect the political story will often be disappointed – and the work is, after all, subtitled a ‘a new history of political
philosophy’.
A prime instance of this occurs early on when, after a close reading of the early books of
Republic we move on, since Plato’s metaphysical convictions we are told are ‘not directly relevant here’. But surely they are relevant, both to an understanding of Plato’s political philosophy and it’s– and other’s histories. One consequence of its omission is that the contrast, when we come to it, with Aristotle’s naturalism lacks depth. Aristotle’s criticism that Plato ‘made the forms exist apart’ is surely crucial to the distinction between the transcendent and the immanent which structures not only the difference between these two thinkers, but also the footnotes to them that constitute so much later thought. Another is that there can only be nods to Augustine’s, and later Christian
Platonism. ‘Luther’s passions’ we are told, ‘were theological and spiritual; his political ideas were less central, and detachable both from the events that provoked him to offer them… and from his theological commitments.’[327] But to claim that Plato’s or Luther’s political ideas were detachable both from their philosophy or theology, is surely, for an historian of political philosophy, a counsel of despair. Ryan rightly points out that the correlation between Protestant reformers and liberal democratic politics won’t sustain claims about any ‘very direct connection between the religious and political ideas of the reformers’[323], But what about indirect connections?
Using the strictly political as a criterion of admission to the story risks excluding ideas or concepts which originated in [what we now call] the fields of theology, sacred history, metaphysics or philosophical psychology. Whilst these may only gain political import indirectly - via the selfperceptions of agents whose belief-systems are shaped by them - the historical narrative may nevertheless be carried at this, rather than the more explicit level of political propositions. For example Protestantism does, as Ryan points out, initially involve an invocation of Augustinianianism along with its anti-institutionalist and quietist turn, the reassertion of predestinarianism, of original and debilitating sinfulness. These are clearly unpromising propositions from which to construct an ideology of political agency, but we know that – as a matter of historical fact - from Luther himself to figures like Cromwell, it permitted the agent to see him(usually)self as an agent of that providential scheme. This is surely something that requires historical explanation. Those Protestant polities that produced proto-democracies were Armininan. Arminianism allowed the [however exiguous] operation of a freely willed acceptance of saving grace, which was an important condition for both religious freedom, and the possibility for the believer to consider him- or even her- self capable of political judgement. Distinctively in England and the Netherlands, Arminianism, normally a dissenting movement, became the endorsed creed of a national church, and with it came a degree of toleration for (some) other Christian sects, and in England – curiously for a polity that had united the secular and religious powers in one – a (relatively) relaxed separation of the religious from the political. This is certainly political - if not social-democratic - agency. Whether you buy this particular version of the story or not, 3 the crucial issue is that in such cases the political story is
3 For a fuller version see J.G.A.Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume I: The Enlightenments of Edward
Gibbon, 1737-1764, (Cambridge, 2003).

implicated [in often indirect and counter-intuitive ways] in a metaphysical and moral psychological story that’s not recoverable without reference to them.
Another consequence of thus corralling the presentation of a political thinker to their more strictly political beliefs is that it is difficult to avoid giving the impression of a thinker as the holder of a series of political policies, or views, rather than seeing those views as informed by a coherent underlying philosophy. Of course, this is not always the case – but you should always give them a proper run for their money. It is an impression enhanced here by the practice, referred to above, of appraising such positions, and comparing them with those of others on similar topics. Having said that, these judgements are almost invariably witty and astute, at the very least provoking; and there are some brilliantly-formulated aperçus: that whilst modern Western European states ‘…have their institutional roots in the European Middle Ages … we think about them in ways borrowed from the
Greeks and Romans.’ (194); Hegel ‘interprets the cultural and intellectual history of mankind as the biography of God’ (658), or the aside that ‘One cannot imagine Edmund Burke reading Hegel with pleasure, but Hegel’s argument is Burkean.’ (673)
Only occasionally does Homer nod. Hobbes doesn’t consider the free rider problem? But surely the free rider is ‘the Foole [who] hath sayd in his heart … that … to keep or not keep covenants was not against Reason, when it conduced to one’s benefit.’ (Leviathan 15). I was surprised to read that in comparison with the English, the French ‘got toleration right’ (646) or that
Burke had ‘no urge to understand [the French Revolution]’ 645. Particularly when the very part of
Reflections where that understanding of the modern fiscal state’s relation to the political economy and sociological forces of the revolution is most acute is dismissed because the argument is now
‘over’ and Burke is merely ‘going on at length about the wickedness of the … expropriation of church property and the incompetence of the revolutionaries new system of taxation.’ (626).
Whilst I’ve been critical, there are excellent treatments here – that on Rousseau, and on the
Founding period in the USA, the introduction and opening sections of the ‘World after Marx’ are particularly fine. The treatment of the issues involved in the early twentieth century’s welfare state, communism and fascism are masterfully deft and insightful and probably ought to be read by any of today’s theory students unfamiliar with them (as so many seem to be). I wrote this pretty well as I read, and as I read, I liked it more and more. This may be partly because it is so well and engagingly written, and partly because historicist feathers get less ruffled the closer we get to the present. This is a book which the author has imbued with his considerable intellectual character. My differences from the author’s conception of the enterprise, should not, of course be taken as suggestions that he has failed to realise his. I learnt many things from reading it, and through its sheer persistent intellectual vigour and acuity, no less than its fundamental decency, it convinces as one way of doing political theory, and perhaps, even constructing a kind of history of it.
University of Exeter Iain Hampsher-Monk