IN PRAISE OF PROLEPSIS: MEANING, SIGNIFICANCE AND THE MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICAL THOUGHT Francis Oakley1

Abstract: To the historian concerned with the long development of Western political thinking, the medieval phase has frequently proved to be difficult to access and the significance of its various aspects or components hard to assess. One way around that difficulty is to sharpen the focus by adopting a world-historical perspective and by taking as ones criterion of significance the degree to which the components of the medieval legacy helped shape the unquestionable singularity of Western political thought. Take that tack, however, and one is likely to fall victim to charges of having succumbed to some sort of mythology of prolepsis. That being so, it is long since time to respond, as here, with a word or two in praise of prolepsis.

[I]t is true, or so Umberto Eco once memorably put it, that the Middle Ages turned us into Western animals.2 But to political philosophers or, more properly, to those among them not altogether allergic to matters historical the centuries we are accustomed to labelling as medieval have always posed something of a challenge. If, in addressing the historical dimension of their subject, they have not quite been able to bring themselves to jump directly from Aristotle (or, maybe, Cicero) to Hobbes (or, maybe, Machiavelli), their engagement with medieval modes of political thinking has often been limited to a probing in the thirteenth century of Aquinas Summa theologiae, though preceded sometimes in the fifth century by a puzzled glance at Augustines De civitate dei and followed, in the fourteenth, by a relieved encounter with Marsiglio of Paduas Defensor pacis. Selecting the appropriate texts from Aquinas has not proved to be too difficult, but an exclusive focus on those texts has tended to promote the odd assumption that that great but singular thinker can safely be taken on matters political to be a typical spokesman for what used to be called the medieval mind. The addition to the putative syllabus of texts drawn from Augustine or Marsiglio has much, then, to
The Oakley Center for the Humanities & Social Sciences, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA. Email: Francis.C.Oakley@williams.edu 2 Umberto Eco, Dreaming of the Middle Ages, in U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, New York and London, 1986), pp. 645. In doing so, Eco stressed the fact that both Americans and Europeans are inheritors of the Western legacy, and [that] all the problems of the Western world emerged in the Middle Ages. He went on to list an array of transformative medieval innovations from the technological to the modern concept of the national state, or from our contemporary notion of love as a devastating unhappy happiness to the conflict between church and state. It is not surprising, he adds, that we all go back to that period every time we ask ourselves about our origins. HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVII. No. 3. Autumn 2006
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recommend it. But in both cases the task of selecting the appropriate material for study turns out to be a tricky one. Certainly, the hallowed practice of focusing on a few crucial chapters drawn from Book XIX of the De civitate dei, however understandable, tends to have the effect of rendering Augustine quasi-unintelligible; and if basic unintelligibility is somewhat less of a challenge with Marsiglio, the temptation to focus exclusively on the first (more recognizably philosophical) Discourse of the Defensor pacis tends to generate its own problems. In effect, it is as apt to sponsor a defective understanding of his thinking as was the imposition on generations of Oxford undergraduates of a highly tendentious selection from Hobbess Leviathan to foster a particular interpretation of that classic work.3 About all of this, of course, it would be unfair to be too harshly judgmental. To the tradition of discourse4 that we are accustomed to labelling as political thought a history, after all, of more than two millennia attaches, and the number of important texts clamouring for attention is truly formidable. Even were that not the case, the factors militating against ease of intellectual access to medieval political thinking while at the same time promoting ease of misinterpretation are multiple. Of those factors, I will limit myself to highlighting just four. First, and most fundamental, I would emphasize the rigidities and confusions introduced into historiography by the triumph in the seventeenth century of the practice of dividing Mediterranean and European history into a trinity of discrete periods labelled as ancient, medieval and modern.5 Spawned by the love affair of Renaissance humanists with the great achievements of the classical era, that practice or mode of conceiving the past succeeded in rooting itself so deeply in the Western consciousness as to seem to be nothing less than a deliverance of nature, itself eligible, therefore, for extension to the histories of other and vastly different civilizations. So much so that even today, despite a century and more of criticism, historians are still occasionally prone to speaking, for example, of medieval China or ancient India, slipping thereby into what Oswald Spengler had derided already in 1917 as the Ptolemaic system of history in which the great Cultures are
3 Thus the Leviathan we encountered in the 1950s as a set text for the Political Theory paper in the Honours Schools of Modern History, omitted the first twelve chapters of Part I Of Man, the last chapter of Part II Of Commonwealth, and the entire third and fourth parts Of a Christian Commonwealth and Of the Kingdom of Darkness. Pretty tendentious pedagogic surgery! 4 Traditions of discourse not of thought, adopting here Lockyers useful distinction between the two. See Andrew Lockyer, Traditions as Context in the History of Political Theory, Political Studies, 27 (2) (1979), pp. 20117. 5 For the development of this system of periodization, see Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1948).

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made to follow orbits around us as the presumed centre of all world happenings.6 Such lapses into cultural myopia are obviously to be avoided, but more directly pertinent to the matter at hand is the fact that the humanist invention of the Middle Ages had the distorting effect of lumping together into a single, long drawn-out period, and in incongruous and dismissive juxtaposition, the disparate and shifting political, intellectual and cultural formations of more than a thousand years. Within that long period, moreover, the revival of Roman legal studies in the twelfth century and the final recovery and translation into Latin of the entire corpus of Aristotles works in the thirteenth mark something of a caesura.7 With that marked disjunction historians have had to struggle as best they can to come to terms. In that effort, some have succeeded in adding of late to the complexities confronting the non-specialist by suggesting (not implausibly) that the great shifts in European political thinking [that] occurred in the twelfth and eighteenth centuries were truly epochal, and that we would be wise to approach the whole period in between as essentially a single epoch.8 Adopt that approach, of course, and what we call the earlier-medieval centuries are consigned to some sort of historiographic limbo, presenting especially to the teacher a further set of challenges. So much so, indeed, that the transition from the comparatively well-engineered intellectual highways of the classical era, via the crumbling by-ways of late antiquity, to the seemingly trackless wastes of the early Middle Ages in the Latin West has all the potential for being pedagogically traumatic. It is not that medieval people, even in these earlier centuries, were unmindful of those pressing questions concerning political life with which people in other eras and cultures had (and have) attempted to grapple: the qualities distinguishing good regimes from bad, the legitimation of the governing authority, its purpose, societal role, organization, limits, and so on. On such matters, indeed, they had quite a bit to say. The problem is that they often said it in
6 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (2 vols., New York, 1916), Vol. 1, p. 18. 7 It was only, of course, in the mid-thirteenth century that the newly-recovered Aristotles Politics became available in Latin translation. Of Platos writings, the bulk (including the Republic) remained unknown to medievals except by reputation. 8 Thus Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe: 12501450 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 191. Cf. the similar sentiments expressed by Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought: 11501630 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 1, and J.H. Burns in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 14501700, ed. J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 13. Prematurely inflating these fugitive straws in the historiographic wind into a firmly-established orthodoxy ripe already for attack, Cary Nederman has recently launched a robust critique of what he calls the Neo-Figgisite claim for medieval-modern continuity in the realm of political thinking see C.J. Nederman, Europe and the Historiography of European Political Thought: Marsiglio of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and the Medieval/Modern Divide, Journal of the History of Ideas, 66 (1) (2005), pp. 115.

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indirect and distinctive ways, framing such questions (or sidling up to them) in a manner and in contexts that can seem quite odd or alien to those of us acculturated, intellectually speaking, to the more familiar (if various) modes of political thinking characteristic of the classical and modern eras. Until the mid-twelfth century is reached, for example, the historian of political thought will look in vain for the familiar type of work devoted specifically (and maybe exclusively) to political thinking. Instead, s/he is obliged to quarry such ideas from a variety of sources of very different type, not least among them juristic writings (both secular and ecclesiastical), works of theology, biblical commentaries, and even liturgical formularies such as the great royal coronation ordines that reveal so much about the ideology of medieval kingship. This last point, and the last type of source listed, may be particularly problematic for those who are willing to take on the task of guiding students through the medieval phase in the long history of political thought. I propose, then, to focus on it as a pertinent illustration and dwell on it at greater length. I choose to do so, not simply because of the real difficulties of interpretation such liturgical texts are likely to pose for the reader, but also, and rather, because they bear witness to the fact that by far the greater part of the thinking devoted in the early-medieval centuries to matters political was focused intently on the institution of kingship. In itself, this last should not be cause for great surprise. The flowering of the classical polis or city-state, however large it looms in our modern political imagination, had proved in the long run to be no more than a fleeting episode and the legacy handed down directly by the ancient world was a very different one. It was kingship, instead, that was the political form bequeathed to early-medieval society by its Hellenistic and Roman no less than its Celtic and Germanic predecessors. But here, I would suggest, comes into play the second of the factors militating against any easy comprehension of the medieval political experience. What I have in mind is the general failure of most of us, historians no less than political philosophers, to raise our heads high enough to be able to peer out over the parapet of our own particular cultural trenches and to engage the multiple histories of the larger world that stretches out endlessly beyond. The failure also, and therefore, to grasp the cardinal fact that, perceived from a world-historical perspective, it is kingship and not any more consensual governmental form that has for long millennia dominated the institutional landscape of what we today would call political life. For that certainly appears to have been the case at least from the time of the Neolithic revolution (c.8,000 c.5,000 BCE), marked by the rise to prominence of agricultural modes of food production, all the way down to the acceleration in the nineteenth century of the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant shift of a growing percentage of the worlds population into essentially urban modes of occupation. In terms, accordingly, of its antiquity, its ubiquity, its wholly

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extraordinary staying power, the institution of kingship stands out as having been the most common form of government known to humankind. Similarly, the ideological pattern that in one form or another served for long millennia to sustain it. For in terms, again, of its ubiquity and longevity, that ideology can lay strong claim to having been nothing less than the political commonsense of humankind. Like the institution of kingship itself, that commonsense turns out to have been deeply embedded in the sacred and thoroughly informed by it. In effect, as Michelle Gilbert has put it, that kings are sacred is nothing less than an anthropological and historical truism.9 Consigned, therefore, to merely provincial status (again, world-historically speaking) are the consensual, republican, democratic and representative forms that bulk so large on our contemporary political landscape, and to which those of us concerned with political philosophy and its history have tended to devote by far the greater part of our attention.10 Clearly, then, medieval kingship, no less than kingship at large, along with its ideological underpinnings, warrants a far greater amount of attention than it has in fact received. It deserves, in effect, a degree of scrutiny at least commensurate with that lavished since the Renaissance so obsessively and in some ways misleadingly upon the classical polis or city-state. What calls, moreover, with equal urgency for attention, and certainly is not to be taken at all for granted, is the eventual marginalization of kingship in the modern Western world, as well as its parallel decline in the world at large as that world has progressively been drawn into the disenchanting orbit described by the corrosive forces of Westernizing modernization. What is directly pertinent to the eventual forfeiture of legitimacy by the very institution of kingship itself, I would now insist, and the rise in its place of consensual constitutional forms of one sort or another, is the gradual, desacralizing transformation of the monarchical ideology that had got under way already in the Latin Middle Ages. Such thoughts, I recognize, are destined to sit uneasily with what I would identify as the third factor getting in the way of any ease of access to the complexities of medieval political thinking. That factor reflects the long shadow which the classical republican tradition in general, and the Athenian achievement of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE in particular, have together contrived to cast over our Western habits of thinking about the political past. Here I have in mind what has come to function, for those interested in political philosophy and its history, as a sort of constitutive narrative of the course of Western political thinking. No more than implicit, that narrative has served,
Michelle Gilbert, The Person of the King: Ritual and Power in the Ghanaian State, in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 298330 (at p. 298). 10 I base these rather brusque and sweeping claims on the argument developed at length in Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford, 2006).
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nonetheless, as a sort of conceptual screen, working to determine the periods and places to which most attention has characteristically been paid (classical Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and western Europe of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries), to foreground the texts on which students have habitually been encouraged to focus (Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli, the great contract theorists from Hobbes to Kant, the nineteenth-century Utilitarians, and so on), and to frame the interpretative perspective from which those texts have usually been understood. When the history of political thought is approached from that familiar perspective, the institution of kingship and the aura of sacrality so persistently surrounding it do not loom very large at all. For political philosophers, at least, and the contributions of anthropologically- and historically-inclined specialists notwithstanding, ancient and medieval notions of sacral kingship have yet to find a place under the bright lights of centre stage. Nor, until recent years, have the theories of divine right advanced in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by such thinkers as Hadrian Saravia, James I of England, Sir Robert Filmer and Bishop Bossuet fared all that much better. Instead, they have been fated to be better written against than truly understood. One of the reasons for this, I would suggest, and it is the fourth factor impeding ease of access to medieval modes of comprehending the political, is that we tend instinctively to take the predominantly secular nature of our modern political life as something natural to humankind, an unquestionable norm towards which all societies, whatever their history, may properly be expected to tend. From that point of view, of course, what constitutes grounds for puzzlement and calls for explanation is not the emergence on the worldhistorical scene of that familiar secular norm, but rather the presence in the past and the persistence on into the present of societies to which the distinction between the religious and the political has somehow contrived to remain stubbornly alien. Our current and painfully obvious difficulty in coming to terms with the religio-political assumptions of the contemporary Muslim world is simply a dramatic case in point. Hence the perspective so deeply encrypted in our characteristic way of conceiving the history of political thought as to have become almost subliminal; subliminal, surprisingly enough, even for medieval specialists themselves. Within that interpretative frame, some sort of fundamental continuity is assumed to exist between the modes of political thinking characteristic of the modern and those characteristic of the classical world,11 both periods being taken to be committed to the sort of secular and natural modes of explanation appropriate to truly political thinking.
11 The genealogy of this assumption goes back a long way. Thus, alluding to the grounding of governmental authority in consent, Thomas Jefferson himself could speak of that notion as expressing the harmonizing sentiments of the day, and of the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc (italics mine), as placing before mankind the commonsense of the subject in terms so plain and firm as com-

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In contrast, what is seen as standing out in the history of Western political thought, rendering it, accordingly, more difficult to come to terms with, is the medieval period. It is seen, in effect, as constituting something of an exception, as a sacralizing (perhaps even mystifying) deviation from the norm, a period during which the natural categories of political philosophy as we know it were pushed to one side by motifs of supernatural bent. Such (to take a prominent example from among the ranks of medieval specialists themselves) was the perspective embedded in the late Walter Ullmanns approach to the history of political thought, which was taken, accordingly, to possess a secular-religious-secular rhythm, with the medieval religious phase being the one that needed explaining.12 Nor was Ullmann alone among historians of political thought in adhering to that point of view. Thus we hear about the essentially secular unity of life in the classical Hellenic age, and, after its decline, of the [late-antique] Hellenistic propensity for introducing the supernatural into politics. We are reminded that Christianity made purely political thought impossible, and that the peculiar problem of Church and State, which Christianity introduced and which dominated so much of medieval political thinking, involved the greatest perturbation which has ever drawn mens thoughts about the state out of their proper political orbit. We are even assured, long years of specialized work in cultural anthropology and comparative religion to the contrary, that [m]edieval Europe offers for the first time in history the somewhat paradoxical spectacle of a society trying to organize itself politically on the basis of a spiritual framework, or, again, that it was only with the collapse of the medieval ideal of a Christian commonwealth that there occurred a return to a more purely political conception of the State.13 That was certainly the perspective into which, like many another student in the mid-twentieth century, I myself was socialized. Over the years, however,
mand their assent Letter to Lee in 1825; see The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. H.A. Washington (9 vols., New York, 1884), Vol. 7, p. 407. 12 For Ullmanns position and the numerous works in which he developed it, along with a critical appraisal of what it involves, see Francis Oakley, Celestial Hierarchies Revisited: Water Ullmanns vision of Medieval Politics, Past and Present, 60 (August 1973), pp. 348; reprinted in F. Oakley, Politics and Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and Early-Modern Political Thought (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 1999), pp. 2572. 13 In order of citation (all italics mine): George H. Sabine, A History of Political Thought (New York, 3rd edn., 1953), p. 159; Francis Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background (2 vols., Washington DC, 1966), Vol. 2, p. 488; Christopher Morris, Western Political Thought: I Plato to Aristotle (New York, 1967), p. 166; C.H. McIlwain, Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York, 1932), p. 146; John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (New York, 1962), pp. 1011. For a residual echo of that way of thinking in a more recent work, see Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought 3001450 (London and New York, 1996), pp. 1278.

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that way of looking at things I have come to view as a fundamentally flawed one; and that hard-won conclusion is directly pertinent to my own decision about which, of the many aspects of medieval political thinking open to historical scrutiny, are to be taken to be the most significant and most worthy of the political philosophers attention. The historical rhythm I detect in the ebb and flow of ideas is not a secular-religious-secular one, but, rather, religious-religious-secular. Almost a century and a half ago, writing even before anthropology and sociology had emerged as formal academic disciplines and in a compelling evocation of the centrality of religion to the life of the ancient city-state, Greek no less than Roman, Fustel de Coulanges warned his own contemporaries of the ever-present danger of anachronism, of historical narcissism, of finding their own attitudes (as had the pioneering German and English Hellenists of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries)14 reflected all too readily in those of ancient peoples whose characteristic modes of thought were in reality fundamentally alien to theirs. Since he wrote, moreover, the findings of the classicists, the cultural anthropologists, the students of archaic and comparative religion have converged in such a way as to confirm the precocity of his vision and to make it clear that the transition from the archaic and classical to the Christian outlook was a shift, not so much from a secular to a religious viewpoint, as from one ancient and widespread mode of religious consciousness to another and radically different one.15 Something similar, I should add, was to be true of the later transition in Western Europe from the world of Celtic and Germanic paganism to that of early-medieval Christianity.16 That said, of course, it becomes no longer the religious nature of medieval political thinking that cries out for explanation, but rather the emergence in the modern era of the uniquely secularized political vision that has so succeeded in shaping the commonsense of the modern Western world that we are persistently tempted, even at the cost of rampant anachronism, to see it as something grounded in the very nature of humankind. In any such effort at explanation, a close scrutiny of the medieval experience must necessarily loom large. For it was in the Middle Ages, from the late-eleventh century onwards, that the age-old and world-wide pattern of regal sacrality was finally
14 See, e.g., Eliza Marian Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (London, 1935); Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA, 1980); Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1981). 15 Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment, pp. 10107. 16 For this, as it impinged on the realm of religio-political thinking, see, e.g., the pertinent articles by Otto Hfler and Ake N. Strm in The Sacral Kingship: Contributions to the Central Theme of the VIII International Congress for the History of Religions, Rome, April, 1955 (Leiden, 1959), pp. 664, 701, 70215; D.A. Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship (Oxford, 1970); William A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (Manchester, 1970).

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called directly into question. That pattern of thinking did endure in attenuated form on into the early-modern period. But it was in medieval political thinking, nonetheless, that we can discern the effective start of the process that led to the drainage of legitimacy from the sacral ideology that in one form or another had for long millennia sustained the monarchical institution itself. It is also, for that matter, in medieval political and constitutional thinking that one can discern the crystallization of the alternative notion of legitimating authority by consent and the hammering out of the theory and practice of delegated representation in the absence of which consent-based constitutional forms would have been impossible in large territorial states. Similarly, the gradual emergence of the notion of autonomous individuality which, in the early-modern era, was destined to intersect with more traditional and communitarian versions of consent theory, transforming them thereby into the highly specific version that was to lie at the heart of the contractarian tradition of political philosophizing from Hobbes to Kant.17 Such are the aspects of medieval political thinking that stand out from a world-historical perspective as being of unquestionable significance and worthy of selection for scrutiny by anyone sensitive to the singularity of modern Western political thinking. As such, they are no more than a subset of that broader range of issues one would have to address if one committed oneself to probing the medieval experience with the purpose of identifying the foundations of Western cultural singularity at large. All very well, and obvious enough. Or so one would have thought. But take that position, it turns out, or any position akin to it, and one is doomed to becoming the target of charges of presentism, or, more grandiously, of having bought into some sort of mythology or prolepsis.18 The Middle Ages,
For my own take on these interlocking topics and for an introduction to the immense body of literature concerning them, I venture to refer to Francis Oakley, Legitimation by Consent. The Question of the Medieval Roots, Viator, 14 (1983), pp. 30335 (reprinted in Oakley, Politics and Eternity, pp. 96137), and F. Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Ideas (New York and London, 2005), pp. 87109. The notion of consent that was central to the modern contractarian tradition was quite specific. It was that of a concatenation of equal and autonomous individuals contracting among themselves to enter political society, and freely imposing on themselves thereby an obligation to obey political authority. 18 This was in fact the fate of my book The Medieval Experience: Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity (New York, 1974). See Marcia L. Colish, Intellectual History, in The Past and the Future of Medieval Studies, ed. John van Engen (Notre Dame and London, 1994), pp. 190203 (at p. 190 and p. 199 n.5, where it is classified as indulging in a proleptic reading of medieval thought. In this respect, however, I find myself in congenial company. Kathleen Biddick has similarly labelled Georges Dubys and Philippe Brausteins reflections on the Emergence of the Individual as a popular form of presentism. See A History of Private Life, II Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Phillip Aries and Georges Duby (Cambridge, MA and London, 1988), pp. 507630; Kathleen Biddick, Bedes Blush: Postcards from Bali, Bombay, Palo Alto, in The Past
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Umberto Eco again said, have always been messed up in order to meet the vital needs of different periods.19 Is that, then, what would really be involved if one were to adopt the approach to medieval political thinking that I am proposing? If so, is the need to come to terms with the singularity of modern Western political thinking really vital enough to warrant that sort of messing up of a body of political thinking which has its own historical integrity and should more properly (and less anachronistically) be understood as responding to the questions that medieval people themselves posed, rather than to those that seem more pertinent to our concerns today? These not being questions that can be brushed aside with impunity, I turn in the remaining part of this essay to a brief attempt to address them. It is all the more important to make this attempt in that they are questions deeply embedded in the lively debates of the last forty years or so concerning the need to strive for an understanding of the historical career of political philosophy such that historians themselves would be prepared to recognize it as truly historical. As early as 1965, and summing up the approaches of a distinguished group of colleagues assembled to convey in a lecture series the state of scholarly play so far as medieval political thought was concerned, Beryl Smalley noted the change in outlook that had clearly taken place since her own student days at Oxford, when, she said, the robust confidence and clarity of A.J. Carlyles classic interpretation had undoubtedly been shaped by the contemporary concerns of the Christian socialists of the pre-1914 era the Lib-Labs
and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. van Engen, pp. 1644 (at p. 36). For the mythology of prolepsis, see Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 353 (at pp. 224); reprinted in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 445. The ur-statement on the danger of anachronism and the subordination of the past to the present is Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), esp. pp. vi, 16, 92. For a sense of the ongoing clash between presentists and pastists among medieval scholars and especially those of feminist bent, see the papers gathered together in Speculum, 68 (2) (1993), an issue edited by Nancy F. Partner and entitled Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism. Especially noteworthy are Judith M. Bennett, Medievalism and Feminism, pp. 30931, and Kathleen Biddick, Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible, pp. 389418. Also The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. van Engen, esp. Colish, Intellectual History, pp. 190203, and Biddick, Bedes Blush, pp. 1644, the latter in critical dialogue with the first chapter of Caroline Walker Bynums fine book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food for Medieval Women (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1987). In that book Bynum deplores (p. 31) the intrusion of presentist issues into recent work on medieval women, and proposes to consider medieval womens piety not by asking how it answers questions posed by presentist concerns or male perspectives but by allowing the women themselves to generate questions as well as answers. 19 Eco, Dreaming of the Middle Ages, in Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, p. 68.

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as their detractors call them in the phrase of that time.20 Her stance, however, if unmistakably critical, was affectionately so, and terms like presentist and proleptic, no less aggressive for being quite so imprecise, make no appearance in her commentary. Noting, nonetheless, that her fellow lecturers were all historians by training, she does go on to say that they all, therefore, see political theories as part of history. That is to say, they all relate their [medieval] theorists to the contemporary scene [of the past in question] and warn us that they were trying to solve their own problems, not ours.21 Similarly, J.G.A. Pocock who, commenting on Judith Shklars impatience with the insignificance of so many of the thinkers he had discussed in the introduction to his edition of Harringtons political writings, and cranking up the epistemic misery a bit, deployed the odd claim that in accepting history the way it was the historian must share his own ideas of significance with [or derive them from] those of actors in the history itself.22 In his classic Whig Interpretation of History, Herbert Butterfield had long since canvassed in more general terms much the same position;23 and more recently, in relation specifically to political philosophy, W.H. Greenleaf had evinced a measure of sympathy with it.24 In response, however, to such a claim, I would respond that any history of political thought that was shaped in thoroughgoing fashion by so odd a commitment would be open to criticism no less fierce than that directed over the past forty years at histories that were taken to have been constructed in accordance with the notion of a great tradition of canonical works in political philosophy.25 Indeed, I would be hard pressed to identify such a history. The norm, instead, as David Boucher has properly insisted,26 is for such histories to combine, though in differing degrees, the historians traditional concern with the historicity of past texts with some orientation to the questions and
Trends in Medieval Political Thought, ed. Beryl Smalley (Oxford, 1965), pp. viiiix. Ibid. (italics mine). 22 J.G.A. Pocock, Political Theory, History, and Myth: A Salute to John Gunnell, Annals of Scholarship, 2 (1980), pp. 325 (at p. 19), commenting on Judith Shklars review of his The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977) in Political Theory, 6 (4) (1978), pp. 55861. 23 Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 25. 24 W.H. Greenleaf, Oakeshotts Philosophical Politics (London, 1966), p. 28. 25 For this last, see John G. Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1979). 26 David Boucher, Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster, 1985), pp. 23743. Bouchers specific concern here is with the constant antagonism between textualists and contextualists or, more broadly, those he labels as historical impurists and historical purists. But the tension between those willing to deploy criteria of significance derived from present-day concerns and those who insist, to the contrary, that such criteria have to be native to the historical period being studied is, of course, a closely-related one.
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concerns generated by the era and circumstances in which s/he is writing. Quentin Skinners own Foundations of Modern Political Thought is a case in point. Fine work though it undoubtedly is, it makes use (almost inevitably) of the type of historical tactic that he himself had earlier dismissed as smacking of the mythology of prolepsis.27 The book may in fact be the better (it is certainly the more interesting) precisely because he saw fit to do so. In this connection, moreover, we would be wise to recall that even when Butterfield himself launched his influential attack on anachronism and on the subordination of the past to the present, he had still been at pains to concede that there was at least some sense in which history must also be written from the point of view of the present.28 Similarly, R.G. Collingwood (who did so much to revive interest in the philosophy of history in the Anglophone world), speaking of what he termed the question-answer complex which constitutes what people call real life, the superficial or obvious present of the mind in question, had insisted that every historical question ultimately arises out of real life, that we study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act.29 Skinner himself being observably and self-confessedly a thinker of Collingwoodian sympathies, it would have been odd, indeed, had he been led, even in the most terrorist of his critical onslaughts upon bad historical practice30 to deny altogether the presence, even in the most purist of historical endeavours, of that complex and baffling interplay between past and present on which commentators like HansGeorg Gadamer, Domenick LaCapra or, more recently, Constantin Fasolt have dwelt so insistently.31
27 Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols., Cambridge, 1978). His other mythologies of doctrines and of parochialism also put in an appearance in the book. For illustrations of this, see Boucher, Texts in Context, pp. 23943. 28 Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, pp. 16, 92. 29 R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), pp. 11314. Hence, he continues, the plane on which ultimately all problems arise is the plane of real life; that to which they are referred for their solution is history. 30 It is Skinner himself who now ruefully describes as a terrorist attack his highly influential essay Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas (1969) see above, note 18. See Quentin Skinner on Encountering the Past (an interview with Petri Koikkalainen and Sami Syrjmki), in the Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 6 (2002), pp. 3463 (at p. 39). 31 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York, 1986); Domenick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts, in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Domenick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca and London, 1982), pp. 4785; D. LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca and London, 1985); Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004), esp. ch. 1, pp. 345. For Skinners Collingwoodian sympathies, see Skinner, A Reply to my Critics, in Meaning and Context, ed. Tully (at pp. 2334, 2745), and Quentin Skinner on Encountering the Past, pp. 448. Cf. Boucher, Texts in Context, pp. 193249 (esp. pp. 1978).

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No such denial, certainly, is foregrounded earlier or later in any of Skinners theoretical or metahistorical writings. He is certainly not prone to evoking the prospect of a Gadamerian fusion of horizons between the interpreter locked in his own historicity and the past texts he is studying,32 or to emphasizing, as does LaCapra, the necessity of moving beyond a merely documentary approach in the direction of a more dialogic reading of historical texts.33 But Skinner is careful to concede that all forms of history are bound to be whiggish in the sense that the problems historians choose to address will necessarily reflect their own sense of intellectual priorities.34 Pace Butterfield and other critics of Whig history, we cannot limit ourselves to applying only those criteria of significance which were current and accepted at the relevant historical time. Instead, we have to make our own decisions about what to study by applying our own criteria for judging what is rational and significant.35 Even at the start (1969), when he had set out to attack the alleged mythology of prolepsis his concern had not been to deny the significance that an argument embedded in some historical text might well have for us today. Nor was it to deny the legitimacy of a historians being possibly more interested . . . in the retrospective significance of a given historical work or action than in its meaning for the [historical] agent himself. Instead,
Though he would now concede to feeling strongly the force of Gadamers point that we can hope to see in the texts we study only what we are permitted to see by the horizons of our own culture and the pre-judgments built into it (Quentin Skinner on Encountering the Past, p. 50). Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 26774, 32541. 33 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, pp. 505, 7885; LaCapra, History and Criticism, pp. 3644. See again, Quentin Skinner on Encountering the Past, pp. 556, where he issues two caveats on this precise matter: [First], If we are too importunate about wanting our forebears to speak directly to us, we run the risk of pulling their arguments out of shape and thus of losing contact with what they actually thought. The other caveat is that, even if we manage to avoid that danger, we must not confuse the project of mounting such a dialogue with the project of gaining a historical understanding of our forebears thought. To understand someone elses beliefs, you need to attend not merely to what they say; you also need to find some means of discovering what they saw themselves as doing in saying what they said. 34 Skinner, A Reply to my Critics (1988), in Meaning and Context, ed. Tully, p. 248. 35 Skinner, Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action (1974), in Meaning and Context, ed. Tully, pp. 1001. At the same time, as he added in 2002 with unnecessarily apologetic reference to his Foundations of Modern Political Thought: My own book is far too much concerned with the origins of our present world when I ought to have been trying to represent the world I was examining in its own terms so far as possible. Or again, more forlornly but scratching the same intellectual itch: [M]oral and political motivations have always affected my choice of subjects for research. On the other hand, I very much hope that they have not affected the way in which I then approach and treat those subjects. I want my work to be as historical as I can possibly make it, but I also want it to have some political point. Quentin Skinner on Encountering the Past, pp. 50, 54.
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his purpose was to deplore what he saw as a tendency to turn judgments about such a works significance into affirmations about its contents.36 Although he alludes to the work of the literary theorist E.D. Hirsch, Jr. only in passing,37 it remains the case that during the 1960s when Skinner was beginning to formulate his own views about the history of political thought, Hirsch had repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that similar moves were in play in interpretative controversies at large. In such controversies, he had pointed out, what was frequently involved was less any conflict over original versus anachronistic meanings than an unfortunate confusion between meaning and significance.38 He had gone on, then, and responding in this to the promptings of Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, to discriminate firmly in interpretative endeavours between meaning and significance. He had done so in a way, I believe, that is both fundamental and clarifying and also directly pertinent to the epistemic status of the admittedly present-oriented approach to medieval political thinking that I have been advocating. Present-oriented, it may be, but not exactly presentist, the latter being an unhelpfully blousy term of derogation and the point centrally at issue being the criterion or criteria which the historian should use to identify those aspects of the vast body of medieval political thinking to be viewed as significant and worthy of selection for particular scrutiny. So far as Hirsch is concerned, the term meaning should properly be used to refer to the whole verbal meaning of a text, but significance used, rather, to denote textual meanings in relation to a larger context, i.e. another mind, another era, a wider subject matter, an alien system of values, and so on.39 Significance, therefore, is quite explicitly
36 Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, in Meaning and Context, ed. Tully, pp. 445. 37 He does so in his Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts (1976), reprinted in Meaning and Context, ed. Tully, pp. 6878 (at pp. 6870). In 1988, though, emphasizing that his own principal concern was not with meaning but with the performance of illocutionary acts, he sought to distance himself from Hirschs formulations concerning meaning. See Skinner, A Reply to my Critics, in Meaning and Context, ed. Tully, pp. 23188 (at pp. 26970). 38 E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago and London, 1976), pp. 858, reproducing material first published in 1972. At that time, he had been focusing on the distinction since 1960, when he had first discussed its roots in Frege and Husserl see E.D. Hirsch, Objective Interpretation, PMLA, 75 (September 1960), pp. 66379. For subsequent refinements and/or modifications of his position, see E.D. Hirsch, Gadamers Theory of Interpretation, The Review of Metaphysics, 18 (3) (1965), pp. 488509; E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London, 1967), pp. 8, 51, 623, 127; E.D. Hirsch, Aims of Interpretation, pp. 113, 7992; E.D. Hirsch, Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted, Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984), pp. 20225; and E.D. Hirsch, Transhistorical Intentions and the Persistence of Allegory, New Literary History, 25 (3) (1994), pp. 54967. 39 Hirsch, Aims of Interpretation, pp. 23, or, as he has put it more recently: Meaning . . . may be conceived as a self-identical schema whose boundaries are determined by

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meaning-as-related-to-something-else, and while meaning is a principle of stability in interpretation, significance, accordingly, embraces a principle of change.40 For Hirsch himself, the great advantage of this distinction is the degree of ambassadorial flexibility it affords us as we go about the complex negotiation between past and present that is part and parcel of all humanistic endeavour but quintessentially so of historical work. It permits us, he says, to acknowledge the force of the claim that not just our texts but also our [own] understandings are historical without being led thereby to concede to the extreme perspectivists, dogmatic relativists, or (as he prefers to call them) cognitive atheists, that all attempts accurately to reconstruct past meanings are doomed to failure.41 Moreover, it authorizes us to find the significance for us of a past utterance (as did the medieval allegorist, as do current readers of post-structuralist sympathies, and as do most of us, even the most resolute of pastists or historical purists, at least some of the time)42 in the way in which the text can be seen (or made) to speak to our present condition.43 But it does so and the point is of central importance without forcing us thereby to abandon the countervailing humanist conviction that it is in principle within our power, should we so desire, and should the pertinent enabling and contextual evidence be available, to penetrate to the original historical meaning intended by the author. For without such a stable determinacy of meaning, Hirsch argues, there can be no knowledge in interpretation, nor any knowledge in the many humanistic disciplines based upon textual interpretation.44 The history of political thought being one of those disciplines (or subdisciplines), it is the distinctions further advantage, or so I myself would want to add, that it grants to those of us ploughing that particular furrow the historians traditionally robust commitment to the historicity of the meanings wrested from the documents of the past, without at the same time having to
an originating speech event, while significance may be conceived as a relationship drawn between that self-identical meaning and something, anything else. See Hirsch, Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted, p. 204. 40 Hirsch, Aims of Interpretation, p. 80. 41 Ibid., pp. 3, 5, 81 and 13, where he labels Jacques Derrida as currently [1976] the most fashionable of the theologians of cognitive atheism in the domain of literary theory. 42 Even those historical purists who stress the otherness of the past are necessarily operating, by way of contrast, with a present-day criterion. Medieval people, after all, no more knew that they were other than that they were medieval; and those who insist on dwelling on the pastness of what we call the past, do so by legislating a priori its clear distinction from what we call the present a move, as Fasolt correctly points out, itself constitutive of the past. See Fasolt, The Limits of History, p. 6. 43 Hirsch, Aims of Interpretation, p. 85, where he refers to the medieval allegorists as the Heideggerians of an earlier day. Cf. his more extended discussion of the allegorical mode and its pertinence to the application of texts in law as well as in other domains in Hirsch, Transhistorical Intentions and the Persistence of Allegory, pp. 54967. 44 Hirsch, Aims of Interpretation, p. 1 (italics mine).

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bind ourselves, with Butterfield, Pocock and their sympathizers, to the odd notion that we must necessarily adopt the outlook and apply only those criteria of significance which were current and accepted at the relevant historical time.45 While it is undoubtedly part of the enterprise of historical reconstruction to labour to discover what actions, achievements, authors, texts, ideas, contemporaries in a given era themselves judged significant, it is far from being the whole of that enterprise. To urge, indeed, that in choosing his or her own emphases and in constructing his or her own account the historian of political thought should be bound by such criteria drawn from the period under investigation would be a cripplingly restrictive move;46 and one, certainly, that would interpose, even for the most historically-minded of political philosophers, still further barriers blocking ease of access to the rich treasure trove of medieval political thinking. If, then, by adopting a world-historical perspective and taking as our criterion of significance the components of the medieval legacy that helped to shape the unquestionable singularity of modern Western political thinking, we are destined to be saddled with the charge of prolepticism, it is long since time for us to embrace our destiny and raise a voice in praise of prolepsis. As mariners by calling on the mysterious oceans of time, we are called upon to become navigators of the treacherous transit from present to past and, in so doing, consciously to choose the magnetic north on which our interpretative compasses will be set. No epistemic privilege, certainly, will attend upon our refusal (or unwitting failure) to make that crucial move. In its absence, indeed, we may well be in danger of drifting directionless on that infinite and trackless sea or of being tugged this way and that by the interpretative currents prevailing momentarily in our own day. Francis Oakley WILLIAMS COLLEGE

These are the words Skinner uses in criticizing the position they describe Some problems in the analysis of political thought and action (1976), in Meaning and Context, ed. Tully, p. 100. For Butterfield and Pocock on the issue, see above, nn. 22 and 23. 46 As Skinner points out (Meaning and Context, ed. Tully, p. 101), such a move would leave us, for example, with a history of seventeenth-century ethical theory in which Spinoza is totally ignored, a history of nineteenth-century logical theory in which Frege is barely mentioned, and so on.

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