Postmodernist Histories

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Notes

¹ Research for this essay was made possible by the award of an Australian Professorial Fellowship. It has benefited materially from comments by Barry Hindess, Joel Isaac, Samuel Moyn and Gary Wickham. For the author’s own discussion of the issues, see I. Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (2006), 78–112; and, for a critical response, F. Jameson, ‘How Not to Historicize Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 34 (2008), 563–82. To this can be subjoined I. Hunter, ‘Talking about My Generation’, Critical Inquiry, 34 (2008), 583–600; and I. Hunter, ‘Spirituality and Philosophy in Post‐Structuralist Theory’, History of European Ideas, 35 (2009), 265–75.

² Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

³ J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

⁴ H. Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat: Die Politica des Henning Arnisaeus (c.1575–1636) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970).

⁵ M. Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

⁶ J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, translated by W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

⁷ M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 208–11, 243–49, 367–73; M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. S. Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), 166–77.

⁸ Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 104–31.

⁹ On this conflict, see D. R. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); K. Haakonssen, ‘The History of Eighteenth‐Century Philosophy: History or Philosophy?’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth‐Century Philosophy, edited by K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3–25; R. Häfner, ‘Jacob Thomasius und die Geschichte der Häresien’, in Christian Thomasius (1655–1728): Neue Forschungen im Kontext der Frühaufklärung, edited by F. Vollhardt (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997), 141–64; M. Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland 1680–1720 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2002), 261–307; and S. Lehmann‐Brauns, Weisheit in der Weltgeschichte: Philosophiegeschichte zwischen Barok und Aufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 21–111, 308–54.

¹⁰ Cf. Pocock’s discussion of ‘civil’ historiography in J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Two, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

¹¹ I. Hunter, ‘The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), 571–600.

¹² On this history, see the fundamental studies in Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, Band 4: Das heilige Römische Reich deutscher Nation, Nord‐ und Ostmitteleuropa, edited by H. Holzhey and W. Schmidt‐Biggemann (Basle: Schwabe, 2001), vol. 1, 291–588. On Kant’s place in this history, see H. Heimsoeth, ‘Persönlichkeitsbewußtsein und Ding an sich in der Kantischen Philosophie’, in his Studien zur Philosophie Immanuel Kants: Vol 1, Metaphysische Ursprünge und Ontologische Grundlagen (Cologne: Cologne University Press, 1956), 227–57; and H. Heimsoeth, The Six Great Themes of Western Metaphysics and the End of the Middle Ages, translated by R. J. Betanzos (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 214–16, 254–9.

¹³ M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, translated by R. Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985); and M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982, edited by F. Gros, translated by G. Burchell (New York: Picador, 2006).

¹⁴ P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, translated by M. Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 272. For more, see Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’.

¹⁵ M. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, translated by J. M. Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 54–5.

¹⁶ For more, see Hunter, ‘Spirituality and Philosophy in Post‐Structuralist Theory’.

¹⁷ J. Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D. G. Carslon (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67, esp. 23.

¹⁸ For more on this, see I. Hunter, ‘The Desire for Deconstruction: Derrida’s Metaphysics of Law’, Communication, Politics & Culture, 41 (2008), 6–29.

¹⁹ I. Kant, ‘On the Common Saying: “This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice”’, in Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by M. J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 273–310.

²⁰ For a critical discussion of the limits of this philosophical approach to politics, see R. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

²¹ For a characteristic example of this kind of denunciation, see I. Kant, ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy, 317–51, at 338–47.

²² Cf., in this regard, Peter Brown’s account of the manner in which neo‐Platonic philosophy exerted political power in early‐Christian North Africa through the exemplary persona of the Platonic sage. P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); and P. Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

²³ See the helpful survey of some of these transformations in M. Stolleis, ‘The Legitimation of Law through God, Tradition, Will, Nature and Constitution’, in Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy, edited by L. Daston and M. Stolleis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 45–56.

²⁴ See, D. Saunders, ‘The Judicial Persona in Historical Context: The Case of Matthew Hale’, in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, edited by C. Condren, S. Gaukroger and I. Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 140–59; and I. Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 51–83.

²⁵ Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 188–208, 288–338.

²⁶ See, D. Kimmich, Epikureische Aufklärungen. Philosophische und poetische Konzepte der Selbstsorge (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993).

²⁷ See, P. Merlan, Monopsychism, Mysticism, Metaconsciousness: Problems of the Soul in the Neoaristotelian and Neoplatonic Tradition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963); and P. Hadot, Plotinus, or The Simplicity of Vision, translated by M. Chase (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1993).

²⁸ On the suspension of truth and falsity in the objects of an intellectual historiography that itself claims empirical truth or falsifiability, see Q. Skinner, ‘Interpretation, Rationality and Truth’, in Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 27–56.

²⁹ Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Politics of History: The Subaltern and the Subversive’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 6 (1998), 219–34; and J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History’, Common Knowledge, 10 (2004), 532–50.

³⁰ For an insider’s account, see L. Braun, Geschichte der Philosophiegeschichte, translated by F. Wimmer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990).

³¹ See, S. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early‐Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

³² On the ‘primacy of practical conflict’ in this style of historiography, see the editor’s Introduction Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, edited by J. Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).