PERFORMING POLITICAL THEORY Pedagogy in Modern Political Theory John Uhr Performing Political Theory “This splendid volume introduces students to the works of some of the most influential modern political philosophers, highlighting the various rhetorical or ‘performative’ strategies they employed. It is a timely and welcome work that will be of great help to undergraduate and graduate students alike.” —Professor Timothy Burns, Baylor University, U.S.A., Editor of Interpretation “This highly readable and accessible new book offers an intriguing take on politi- cal theory. Showing that classic texts can be like ‘scripts’ that are ‘performed’, Uhr explores new ideas of dialogue between text and reader, prompting a refreshing approach to active engagement with theory in the classroom.” —Professor Michael Saward, Warwick University, U.K. “Performing Political Theory shows that close attention to the rhetorical ambi- tions or ‘performance’ of major works of political philosophy is essential for understanding the substance of their teachings. It is a welcome and timely invi- tation to both students and teachers to enter the challenging, exhilarating and potentially liberating world of political thought.” —Professor Haig Patapan, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, Australia John Uhr Performing Political Theory Pedagogy in Modern Political Theory John Uhr School of Politics and International Relations Australian National University Canberra, Australia ISBN 978-981-10-7997-9 ISBN 978-981-10-7998-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7998-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964574 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018, corrected publication 2018 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Stephen Bonk/Fotolia.co.uk Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore P reface This book began as the work of two Australian university colleagues who thought they could write up an account of their attempts to teach courses on the history of modern political theory: from Machiavelli through Nietzsche, with a brief look at a number of contemporary the- orists. The first surprise was that there appeared to be very few books reviewing teaching practices in the general field of political theory. This was especially surprising given the heated professional debates which have surrounded conflicting interpretations of many core historical texts in modern political theory. There are very many books examining the contested nature of modern political theory, but the experts on the sub- stance of political theory seem reluctant to examine the process of aca- demic teaching of political theory. With my teaching colleague at the Australian National University, Dr. William Bosworth, we approached Palgrave who generously pro- vided us with a contract to prepare the planned book. We were confident that scholars interested in political theory might also be interested in our reflections on ways we have tried to teach this subject to undergradu- ate students over several years. Our aim has been to ‘teach the texts’ while leaving most of the knowledge of the surrounding ‘contexts’ to the excellent reports available from editors of anthologies such as The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Essential Readings we relied on (Bailey et al. 2012). In our teaching, we relied on English- language editions of modern Western political thought. So too, in this book, my reports of pedagogy relate to English-speaking students v vi PREFACE learning to read English-language versions of political theories often originally published in another language: Italian, French and German being the main examples. Some students seemed fascinated by those works (translated where necessary) by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau or Kant (and so on) to which we devoted our lectures and invited them to compare; many other students found it all a bit too dry and formal, as though ‘theory’ could be reduced to recollection of ‘the text’ or rather to more than a dozen competing ‘texts’; and yet another group feared that we were befriending the enemy in our apparently misguided attempt to help stu- dents know more about the imposers and imposters who had done their best to hoodwink generations of readers into thinking that ‘theory’ basi- cally meant submitting to the technical rationality of ‘possessive individu- alism’—to apply the category of liberalism devised by Canadian political theorist C. B. Macpherson so many years ago. As academic teachers, Dr. Boswell and I left it open to students to find their own ways of making sense of our recovery of what we thought were the main theories being presented by our gallery of intellectual giants. We assumed that contemporary students of politics and history would want to know what these influential giants thought was the nature of ‘political theory’. For some students, that knowledge was important because this gallery included some of the most inspiring minds of the modern West; for others, it was important because each of us has to unearth our own independence by unravelling ourselves from the ‘identi- ties’ and ‘cultures’ imposed on us as trusting followers of some rather distrustful theorists. The larger point was that conservative and progres- sive students still at least had to try to understand the type of political theory being worked through by each of these past masters, so that they better understood what was that they were either conserving or pro- gressing—or even dismembering, as appeared to be the case for a num- ber of radicals. Our teaching tried to let students test their own pet theories of poli- tics against the imposing power of the leading figures in modern politi- cal thought. The first and in many ways most fundamental challenge was helping students learn how to read classic texts: the great books of reflec- tion in the history of the modern West. To our pleasant surprise, the American Political Science Association (APSA) came to our rescue. One of the Association’s state of the art textbooks is Ada Finifter’s edited PREFACE vii collection The State of the Discipline, published in 1993. Included in this edited collection is a chapter we came to rely on: Arlene Saxonhouse’s ‘Texts and Canons: The Status of Great Books in Political Theory’ (Saxonhouse 1993, 3–26). Saxonhouse had earlier published a provi- sional version ‘Of Paradigms and Cores’ in Polity in 1988 (Saxonhouse 1988, 409–418). The 1993 chapter became our highly valued commen- tary on the competing schools of interpretation around reading classic texts in political theory. One of Saxonhouse’s special gifts is her ability to let students see how much turns on choices we make over instruments of interpretation. Of compelling interest is her articulation of gender as an important factor in how we today read texts written in earlier times. Also of great interest is her calm moderation of two of the rival schools of textual interpretation whose representatives often talk (loudly) past one another: the ‘contextualist’ contribution of Quentin Skinner and follow- ers who value texts according to their place in ‘historical context’, com- pared to the curiously described ‘instrumental’ approach of Leo Strauss and followers, who value texts according to their contemporary educa- tional value. Saxonhouse has a more recent chapter on interpretation in political theory in the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (Saxonhouse 2008, 844–858). She argues that political theorists have ‘put aside too read- ily the practice of reading the great texts with sufficient care’, prefer- ring instead to study them ‘as the expression of the historical context in which they were written’. She further notes that Strauss’ complaints about the neglect of traditional interpretations of close textual reading were treated by the political science discipline as ‘a shrill and readily dis- missed response’ to the growing marginalisation of political theory. Yet the leaders in textual theorising refused to accept the threatened mar- ginal status. Saxonhouse cites three US-based European refugees as dominating the scholarship of textual interpretation: Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar and Leo Strauss who in their ‘profoundly different ways’ pursued their ‘constructive engagement with the texts of political the- ory’. Their aim was not the conventional one of wanting ‘to know what was said, written, thought in the past’—as though we teach students in order to let them know the competing ‘perspectives’ on offer in the his- tory of political thought. On the contrary, their aim was ‘to learn from these works as teachers of questions, perspectives, truths that we tend to forget’ under the pressure of everyday management of our immediate political activities (Saxonhouse 2008, 849–850, 854–855). viii PREFACE As academic teachers, we were impressed that political theory could be given such high prominence. A comprehensive textbook like the Broadview Anthology helps academic teachers present their accounts of modern political theory in ways which allow students to begin their seri- ous engagement with the theorising and not simply the words locked into the core texts in modern political theory. But not every venture to clarify political theory comes to pass. As luck would have it, our teach- ing partnership was challenged when Dr. Bosworth won a new post at the London School of Economics, just around the time he and his partner had their first child. We accepted that our likelihood of match- ing a publisher’s timetable was at risk. We managed the risk by accepting Palgrave’s offer to divide the planned book into two, with this revised contribution moving towards publication quite a few months before the later publication of Dr. Bosworth’s revised contribution. We expect the two books to carry out a dialogue about the diver- sity of teaching practices appropriate for academic courses on the his- tory of modern political thought. It is possible that Uhr and Bosworth lean in opposite directions when teaching the history of modern politi- cal theory, with Uhr tending towards the interpretative school identi- fied by Saxonhouse as ‘instrumentalist’ and Bosworth tending towards the school Saxonhouse identified as ‘contextualist’. It is also possible that the teaching of political theory benefits from this type of dialogue and debate over the instruments of interpretation. I have to thank the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University and the important assistance of its head, Dr. Andrew Banfield, who arranged the teaching collaboration which significantly benefited the two university academics. I also have to thank the many students at the Australian National University who enrolled in our course (officially called ‘Ideas in Politics’) and gave us their experience used so prominently in this book. I also want to thank the Australian Research Council for its award of a research grant on ‘Australian Political Rhetoric’ (DP130104628) which has led to this related research on the rhetoric of modern political theory. My 2015 Palgrave book Prudential Public Leadership examined many aspects of political rhetoric, from theories originally devised by Aristotle to later refinements developed by the great British philosopher J. S. Mill and the great British statesman William Gladstone (Uhr 2015). That book was supported by the two outstanding editors of the Palgrave ‘Recovering Political Philosophy’ series: Thomas Pangle and Timothy PREFACE ix Burns, to whom I owe thanks as their inspiring research have guided this later book. The 2017 Palgrave book I co-authored with another ANU colleague, Dr. Adam Masters, is also relevant as a companion study in political rhetoric and reflection. Leadership Performance and Rhetoric was supported with flair by Palgrave’s two assessors: Dennis Grube of Cambridge University and Robert Faulkner of Boston College (Masters and Uhr 2017). The chapters of that book examining the contribution of English philosopher Francis Bacon to the study of leadership are rel- evant to this book’s recovery of another English philosopher—Lord Shaftesbury—who stands out as a model of the kind of academic teaching Dr. Bosworth and I later discovered we were in many respects imitating. My debts are considerable to the anonymous reviewers commissioned by Palgrave at an early stage in the writing of this book. They will see how impressively helpful their comments have been to the later writing of this book. I also owe many thanks to the Palgrave commissioning edi- tor Vishal Daryanomel based in Singapore, and fellow editor Anushangi Weerakoon, who have managed this book’s publication with professional skill. Karen Clark’s index is brief but very useful. Finally, I again thank my immediate family of Joan and Elizabeth for their endless love, their enthusiasm for spirited debate over politics and political leadership, and their support for a husband and father who, as a retiring academic, never appears quite ready to retire. Canberra, Australia John Uhr references Bailey, Andrew, et al. 2012. The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Essential Readings. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Masters, Adam, and John Uhr. 2017. Leadership Performance and Rhetoric. London: Palgrave. Saxonhouse, Arlene. 1988. Of Paradigms and Cores. Polity 21 (2): 409–418. Saxonhouse, Arlene. 1993. Texts and Canons: The Status of Great Books in Political Theory. In The State of the Discipline, ed. Ada Finifter, 3–26. Washington, DC: APSA. Saxonhouse, Arlene. 2008. Exile and Re-entry: Political Theory Yesterday and Tomorrow. In Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. John Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, 844–858. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uhr, John. 2015. Prudential Public Leadership. New York: Palgrave. The original version of the book was revised: Belated corrections from author have been incorporated. The erratum to the book is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7998-6_8 xi