‘The battle is all there is’: philosophy and history in International Relations theory

Locating the argument in the literature

My argument is not dissimilar to John Gunnell’s who, in describing the ‘philosophization of political theory’, says that it involves:

a disengagement from any actual practices and problems of political inquiry, an appropriation of philosophical categories of analysis and philosophically defined political issues, and a general and often unreflective repetition of a range of metatheoretical arguments superficially transposed into claims about political matters and problems of political knowledge. ¹³

It also joins up with Raymond Geuss’s combative argument against the abstractive methods dominant in contemporary political theory. At the same time, as he repudiates the empirically abstemious and normative philosophical theories of Rawls, Nozick and Habermas, Geuss also defends the notion that ‘politics is historically located: it has to do with humans interacting in institutional contexts that change over time, and the study of politics must reflect this fact’. ¹⁴ On his account, ‘an understanding of history is central to a proper understanding of politics’. ¹⁵ The reasons why we have the particular matrix of ideas, values and institutions we have, says Geuss, ‘are contingent, historical reasons’. ¹⁶ Coming to terms with the prevailing moral and political concepts, thus, requires a ‘historical account’. But, Geuss argues, highly abstract, empirically abstemious, philosophical modes of thought leave no place for matters of history, power and judgement. They lack the realism a good political theory should cultivate. ¹⁷

My argument also draws heavily upon Ian Hunter’s striking series of interventions on ‘the history of theory’. ¹⁸ Since the 1960s, the Anglo-American humanities academy has witnessed what Hunter calls a ‘theory boom’ where a range of disciplines – including literary criticism, philosophy, cultural studies and sociology, as well as political and international theory – have provided a conducive environment for ‘continental’ theories and philosophies to flourish. ¹⁹ By employing an empirically oriented intellectual history, Hunter has been able to historicize this theory boom, showing how it is a continuation by other means of the university metaphysics common to early modern confessional Europe. One of the chief targets of his historical critique is the philosophical supposition that knowledge of the temporal world requires atemporal or transcendental forms of theoretical reflection and that ‘all merely finite, time-bound viewpoints – the domain of history – must remain uncomprehending and subordinate’. ²⁰ Against this viewpoint, Hunter recovers and mobilizes a contextualist form of historiography that finds its roots in Renaissance humanism and seventeenth-century natural law. ²¹ These combative forms of theorizing sought to dismantle metaphysical political philosophies in order to secure secular grounds for civil territorial government in opposition to various moral theologies from scholasticism to Protestant university metaphysics. ²²

Building on these authors, this article is part of a wider attempt to broaden the conception of theory in IR today so as to encompass non-philosophical modes of theorizing. ²³ The exclusion of history and historiography from what is considered theory is best viewed as a historically contingent and partisan intellectual move, not a definitive truth about theory. But in IR today there seems precious little historical reflection on the emergence of the dominant conceptions of theory in the discipline and very little questioning of philosophy’s self-appointed role as epistemic judge. This should not be confused with the ubiquitous narratives of IR’s evolution through various stages, paradigms or debates. Those narratives are not histories of the conception of theory so much as mythologized stories of the dialectical development of the discipline constructed through the backward projection of present theories. They are better understood, as Conal Condren explains in a related context, ‘less as attempts to understand the past as such, than as projections to help consolidate and advertise in the present’. ²⁴

I propose to defend historical modes of theorizing as important, if largely unacknowledged, alternatives to philosophical modes of IR theory. I want to highlight, in particular, the neglect of historiography as a form of political and international theory. ²⁵ Such an approach proves particularly useful in coming to terms not only with the emergence of the discipline’s object of enquiry, the international, but also with the discipline’s history. ²⁶ In this article, the intention is to shed light on some of the pre-history of the present theoretical scene in the discipline of international relations. In particular, it highlights the continuing clash between philosophy and history as two distinctive and often, but not always, opposed intellectual outlooks. ²⁷

Before continuing, it is important to clarify what I mean to distinguish by the terms philosophy and history. These are both disciplines and intellectual practices with long and complex histories both inside and outside the Western academy. I follow J. G. A. Pocock who described philosophy as a discipline ‘interested in the thought produced in so far as it can be explained in strict rationality, and in establishing the limits within which this can be done’. ²⁸ The statements produced by philosophers may often refer to past thinkers, but often on the assumption that their precise location in history and the particular context of debate in which they advanced their ideas and arguments are largely irrelevant to understanding their thought and engaging it in present debates. The philosopher’s concern is less with ‘what the author of a statement made in a remote past meant by it so much as with what [the philosopher] in his [sic] present can make it mean’. ²⁹ The past thinker is brought into a dialogue held in the present and made to contribute to present discussion, whether or not the author could possibly have so intended. Problems of anachronism and prolepsis, which matter to the historian, are of little or no consideration to the philosopher.

Pocock distinguishes philosophy from history which is a discipline concerned principally with what happened in the past – whether the happening was an intellectual act like writing a text or giving a speech, or a political action like assassinating a leader, fighting a war, launching a revolution or making a peace deal, for example. While philosophers may submit such acts to philosophical enquiry, the contextual intellectual historian approaches them as acts performed in history and therefore as acts that had specific meanings and purposes at that time. It may be the case that these meanings and purposes have continued into the present (or were continuations of a deeper past), but only empirical historical study can tell us that by elaborating the intellectual or argumentative context in which these acts were performed and received.

The difference between a philosopher’s and historian’s approach to past thought may be summarized as follows: where a historian suspends the truth claims of a past thinker’s text or other intellectual act in order to attain a deeper understanding of political thought and action at that time, a philosopher tends to evaluate past thought on the basis of its truth content or contribution to present knowledge or by classifying the thought on the basis of present categories. The difference is between an intellectual discipline that tends to contextualize by treating the past as the object of historical methods of enquiry and one that tends to decontextualize by treating past thought as objects of context-independent philosophical analysis. Philosophy is ill-equipped to grasp the past as a specific context, not least because that is not generally the purpose it sets for itself and its methods. Samuel Moyn nicely captures the difference between history and philosophy by noting how their different purposes lead to different methods: ‘contextualization in the search for sources is not equivalent to argumentation in the search for truth’. ³⁰

A final preliminary point to make is that IR theory has undergone what Duncan Bell calls ‘a historiographical turn’, incidentally at the same time as intellectual history has undergone an ‘international turn’. ³¹ The historiographical turn in IR has produced impressive results in historical self-understanding, challenging mythological histories of the discipline’s origins and development, especially those narratives built around purported ‘great debates’. It has also given rise to a number of detailed intellectual histories of individual thinkers and schools of thought. In addition to intellectual histories focused on the institutionalization of IR as an academic discipline, there is now a growing and formidable intellectual history focused on contextualizing early modern international thought and successor bodies of thought in the nineteenth century. Finally, there is also growing attention being paid to questions of historiographical method in IR. ³²

One important consequence of these burgeoning literatures is that they recall the importance of history and historiography to theoretical reflection in IR theory and offer an alternative to the philosophization of theory. This article builds on that work of developing a better understanding of past ways of theorizing and thinking politically. But as yet, this literature has not considered the historic rivalry between philosophy and history as a context in which the present discipline of IR is shaped. Moreover, little attention has been given to the sources of intellectual history as a non-philosophical form of theorizing – one that approaches the past as an object of historical rather than philosophical (normative, epistemological or ontological) knowledge. It might be implicit in some of the historiographical turn, but has not yet been made explicit.

Philosophy and history: an ongoing rivalry

History does not possess the same cachet or prestige as philosophy in today’s IR theory. If there is a historiographical turn occurring in IR, as Duncan Bell (2001) has claimed, ³³ it very much follows behind a range of philosophically inspired turns. ³⁴ Perusal of some recent IR theory collections is revealing. The Edkins and Vaughan-Williams, and Moore and Farrands volumes, for example, provide long lists of theorists IR scholars should apparently engage with, all of whom are described as philosophers of one kind or another. ³⁵ By turning to the high priests of theory from Adorno and Agamben to Virilio and Zizek, we are told, the intellectual challenge shifts from questions of states and anarchy to questions of ontology and ‘being-with’, ³⁶ two thematics central to post-Heideggerian metaphysics but with little traction or utility outside academia in the world of international relations.

This is not to say that philosophically inclined IR theorists completely ignore history. Post-structuralist IR theorist Nick Vaughan-Williams, for example, says that he wants to ‘bring not just history but specifically the “problem of history” into [the] study of international relations’. ³⁷ His purpose is to combat the ‘interpretive closure’ imposed on the historical record. He proposes doing so by employing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading technique so as to open history to différance – Derrida’s improvised figure of thought referring to the endless differentiation, disruption and deferral of meaning. Vaughan-Williams not only enacts différance in his deconstructive reading, but différance also characterizes history itself on his reading. History is différance, and, in a felicitous symmetry, deconstruction is historicity by virtue of its ‘openness to historical meaning’. ³⁸

Vaughan-Williams does not hesitate to deploy the recondite philosophical discourse of deconstruction in his specification and analysis of the problem. Most importantly, and symptomatically of his approach, Vaughan-Williams is far less interested in the task of illuminating the past, in conducting empirical historical investigation or in devising methods capable of performing such a task than performing a deconstruction of history in the discursive register of philosophy. History, as the study of what happened, is subordinated to a deconstructive philosophical operation to disrupt and defer meaning. The past is addressed not as an object inviting historical investigation but as an object susceptible to the trans-historical imperatives and operations of philosophical deconstruction.

This philosophical treatment of history is hardly new. Philosophers since Socrates and Plato have been disinterested in the past as an object of historical knowledge. To be sure, historians since Thucydides, Socrates’ contemporary in ancient Greece, have reciprocated, showing an equal disinterest in philosophy. Indeed, by early modern times the disinterest turned to disdain in the clash between philosophy and rhetoric. ³⁹ Lorenzo Valla, for example – the fifteenth-century Italian philologist and rhetorician best known for demonstrating the Donation of Constantine a forgery – held philosophy, especially the scholastic-Aristotelian variety, in contempt. Its proliferating abstractions and superfluous distinctions may promise some kind of intellectual consolation, but, according to this pugnacious humanist, were useless in providing a ‘straightforward and effective language of civic administration suitable for political and ethical discourse’. ⁴⁰

Later in the century, a robust defence of philosophy and the vita contemplativa would be mounted in Florence. Christoforo Landino, for example, used Platonism to challenge Florence’s republican heritage and the vita activa. Drawing on Marsilio Ficino and giving succour to Lorenzo de Medici, he argued that the ‘noblest and most praiseworthy way of life … consists in rising above the mundane obligations of the vita activa by ascending to the heights of philosophy’ and by becoming a philosopher king. ⁴¹

This clash between philosophy and its humanist enemies continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Ian Hunter has shown, in the context of confessional conflict, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius launched scathing attacks on various forms of scholastic and Protestant metaphysics for overstepping the proper limits of their intellectual domain to interfere in civil affairs of which they had no practical knowledge or know-how. ⁴² It is important to note that neither philosophy nor history as intellectual formations remained unchanged during early modernity, let alone in the period up to the present. Nor has either been absent of internal disagreement. A more comprehensive historical account would require more attention to the changing character of the intellectual battles waged both inside and between philosophy and history. ⁴³ But in the space available here, reversion to the larger categories nonetheless opens the way to further historical investigation.

Historical Renaissance: recovering historical modes of thought ⁴⁴

Without attempting an exhaustive genealogy, the purpose of this section is to sketch the early modern European origins and transmission of a historical mode of political thought. From Renaissance innovations in humanist historical methods through to absolutist historiography and Enlightenment civil narratives, we see the descent of a historical mode of thought that fought an ongoing battle with different historical variants of philosophy in order to defend the autonomy of the civil domain and resist attempts to subjugate politics to abstract, decontextualized moral philosophy.

As an intellectual movement, the humanism that arose during the Renaissance forged its identity in hostile combat with scholastic philosophy. ⁴⁵ Its most fertile ground was not so much inside universities, where scholastics monopolized philosophy, ⁴⁶ but in the courts and chanceries of Italian city-states where the exigencies of politics and diplomacy required the intellectual formation of civic or political rather than philosophical or moral personae. This led to a preference for philology, rhetoric and history over moral and natural philosophy.

There are two key features of Renaissance humanism that are relevant to my argument. First, humanist histories were decidedly political in their defence and legitimation of territorial statehood and their attacks on scholastic and religiously inspired philosophical defences of universal empires. Second, the Renaissance was crucial in reinvigorating historical enquiry through its development of humanist philological methods. In making the past (and questions of politics and authority) an object of historical rather than philosophical or theological knowledge, humanist history writers provided ammunition not only to dismantle the metaphysical claims to eternal or universal authority vested in the Church or Empire but also to legitimize civil territorial government.

Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini are the best known of the Renaissance political humanists, but their illustrious Trecento and Quattrocento predecessors include Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini – all of whom were Florentine chancellors, as well as political or civic historians. These men of politics prized the vivere civile or vita activa over the vita contemplativa, the latter of which they equated with the dereliction of civic duty. ⁴⁷ In their disavowal of philosophy, they refused to be held to account by moralists. Uninterested in abstract moral principles, Machiavelli appreciated that ‘in real political life all rules of conduct must be adapted to specific circumstances’. ⁴⁸ That is not to suggest that politics is an entirely morality-free zone. But it is to suggest, as Max Weber would argue centuries later, that politics develops its own morality and forms of reasoning distinct from others orders or spheres of life. ⁴⁹ As Maurizio Viroli explains, for Machiavelli, political decisions require ‘discretion’ – that is, ‘a highly refined form of prudence that is not based on general rules, that cannot be learned in books, and that very few men [sic] have by nature or are able to attain through a long practice’. ⁵⁰ In other words, Machiavelli, the humanist and occupant of civil office, was a casuist who understood that political morality involves the adjustment of general rules to the particularities of the case. ⁵¹

The ‘central discovery of the historical intellect’, as Pocock put it, was that ‘each of the phenomena of history existed in its own time, in its own right and in its own way’. ⁵² Historical study required methods capable of registering and apprehending the past in all its familiarity and strangeness, continuity and change. While philosophers could certainly make the past an object of their enquiry and still do, humanists treated the historical past as an object of historical rather than philosophical knowledge. ⁵³

In the humanist search for historical understanding, philosophy’s importance declined considerably. The task was not to assess past thought against ideas presently believed to be timeless or superior but to grasp the past more accurately and in its own terms. This meant recovering the actual, historical thinker rather than the one who had been passed down through generations of interpretation and glossing. In their quest to recover insights from authoritative classics of antiquity, Renaissance humanists were thus compelled to place those authors in an appropriate historical context and treat their thoughts as historical phenomena. ⁵⁴

History is thoroughly woven into Machiavelli’s political theory. ⁵⁵ This emphatically historical approach required an enquiry into an author’s intention and motivation, an account of the circumstances prompting their questions and answers and an understanding of ‘the reason for their actions’, as Machiavelli put it in his famous letter to Francesco Vettori of 10 December 1513. ⁵⁶

The aim of humanist historiography was to dismantle metaphysical agendas of ecclesiastic and scholastic theologies and replace them with temporal-political agendas of civil governance. Humanist histories from Bruni to Machiavelli were decidedly political insofar as they were ‘not written for the delectation of other scholars and humanists but as a guide for literate statesmen’. ⁵⁷ Humanist historians made politics and political community the ‘font of value’ and the point of enquiry. ⁵⁸ In doing so, they brought politics down from the heavens to the earth, encouraging a more empirical and mundane view of politics and treating the Church and Empire as historical phenomena just like any other political actor.

This humanist ‘bias toward the political’, as Pocock put it, required intellectual tools and resources unavailable to or disavowed by theologico-metaphysical agendas. ⁵⁹ Crucially, as J. G. A. Pocock argued in his masterpiece, The Machiavellian Moment, it demanded an understanding of politics as a historically situated, contingent activity that took place in historical time. Earthly actors and institutions interacted in particular contexts and changeable circumstances.

The form of political reason associated with the emergent civil territorial state required new methods of understanding, acquiring, keeping, accessing, managing and interpreting the historical data of politics – methods unavailable to a scholasticism which, in any case, converted history into an unchanging, eternal present (nunc stans) and converted political thought into transcendental propositions answering eternal questions. For humanists, the emergent ragione di stato (reason of state) associated with civil territorial government possessed its own legitimacy and was in no need of the philosophical or spiritual validation demanded or pursued by scholastics. Rather, it needed practical methods and intellectual techniques capable of managing information, both historical and contemporary, considered integral to the maintenance of governments, whether republics or ‘states’ – Machiavelli’s word for principalities, empires and kingdoms.

Contextual intellectual history: from Cambridge to Florence and back

There is certainly no simple or straight line connecting the two, but it seems plausible to conjecture that the intellectual comportment of the humanist historiographer survives in the contextualist intellectual historian. The insistence on understanding politics as a historically situated, contingent activity with its own forms of morality and rationality and the recognition that apprehending the past requires intellectual tools tailored to the task are common to both. Less concerned with answering the philosopher’s metaphysical questions about epistemology, ontology and moral truth, contextualists – of Florence as much as Cambridge – are principally interested in recovering and explicating the arguments and intentions of historically situated agents on the basis of empirically verifiable evidence. In this final section, I outline some of the central features of contextual intellectual history, particularly as articulated by the so-called Cambridge School.

The Cambridge School of contextualist intellectual history insists on redescribing the localized contexts in which political theory texts are anchored and to which they respond, emphasizing the intellectual debates, discourses and languages available to the author at the time and explaining the kind of intervention intended by the author. Operating within a historical, as opposed to philosophical, register, this approach does not treat political ideas and arguments as disembodied propositions that can be evaluated for their truth content or potential to realize justice or freedom in the present; this is something more likely to interest the philosopher. Rather, like Renaissance humanism, contextualism treats past utterances as historically situated statements made by real individuals engaged in intellectual battle. ⁶⁰

Three key features of contextualism’s treatment of intellectual history may be identified. First, by entering political arguments, these living, breathing individuals were intending to make a point. The author’s words had ‘illocutionary’ force; that is, beyond conveying meaning or propositional content (the ‘locutionary’ effect), in writing what they wrote the author’s words were intended to do something. ⁶¹ They were designed to change or conserve something, to persuade or dissuade, and to endorse or reject a position or policy in political debate. ⁶²

Machiavelli’s Prince, for example, was not intended as a philosophical contribution to the vita contemplativa, despite occasional efforts by modern political theorists to treat it as such. ⁶³ Rather, it was a powerful attempt by someone engaged in the vivere civile to redescribe the challenge of politics in contradistinction to the Christian humanist and scholastic natural law approaches prevalent at the time. ⁶⁴ Machiavelli rejected political thinking structured by the dialectic of the ideal and the real. In the world of politics, for Machiavelli, rarely are philosophical ideals or principles reflected or expressed in reality. This is not to say that Machiavelli eschewed all values and ideals. He did not, as noted above. He was, as Viroli has aptly described him, ‘a realist with imagination’. ⁶⁵ He was able to imagine ‘better worlds … and to work, with determination and prudence, to making them real’, but he recognized the futility of judging political action exclusively through ideals or philosophical principles and, on the basis of his experience, understood that politics was a contingent product of fluid power relations more than a reflection of ideals.

Second, working out what the author’s point or intention was in penning a particular text requires the marshalling of empirical historical evidence about the intellectual, ideological and practical political context in which it is situated. Contextualizing is not simply a matter of ‘providing historical “background” for our interpretation’ of the text; it is, as Skinner observes, to be ‘engaged in the act of interpretation itself’. ⁶⁶ It is to begin to understand what the text is an argument about, and with or against whom it argues. An argument always arises in a particular ‘argumentative context’; that is, it takes up a stance against another argument and positions itself in relation to prevailing conventions. ⁶⁷ The better these are understood, the stronger the interpretation of the text will be and the less likely it will be to engage in anachronism or prolepsis.

It is important to note here that in making arguments authors, as agents, will adopt and sometimes adapt the available languages and conventions depending on their intentions. This should not be interpreted as a form of idealism that ignores social, political and geopolitical circumstances. As Skinner explained in his two-volume classic on The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ‘political life itself sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a range of issues to appear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate’. ⁶⁸ The author is studied as an agent with intentions that can be understood by empirically examining the context. Contextualism’s ‘search for sources’ marks an important difference from the more philosophical approaches for which ‘argumentation in the search for truth’ tends to be primary. ⁶⁹

Again, in the case of The Prince, Machiavelli employs but adapts to his particular purpose the literary genre of mirror for princes. ⁷⁰ His stunning innovation was to redescribe the virtues required of a prince, disavowing the conventional Christian moral virtues as ill-suited to a ruler, especially the new prince. ⁷¹ Of course, for theologians and moral philosophers past and present, Machiavelli’s manual was a moral outrage. It rejected the prevailing normative assumption that the prince’s primary responsibility was to save souls, either his own or his subjects. Most fundamentally, the Florentine secretary wanted to introduce an alternative political morality, one tailored to the needs of a ruler, whose primary responsibility is to govern and maintain the state. For Machiavelli, politics possesses its own morality and does not depend on external philosophical or theological validation; it was, as Benedetto Croce described Machiavelli’s conception of the autonomy of the political, ‘beyond moral good and evil’. ⁷² It is for exactly this reason that The Prince has been such an explosive and controversial text since the mid-sixteenth century. ⁷³

As Florence’s second chancellor, dealing with matters of war and peace, Machiavelli no doubt understood the importance of legitimating courses of political action. In Skinner words:

what it is possible to do in politics is generally limited by what it is possible to legitimize. What you can hope to legitimize, however, depends on what course of action you can plausibly range under existing normative principles. ⁷⁴

The kinds of decisions and actions that can be legitimized, as Renaissance humanists understood well, will ultimately be dependent on the political skills of the actor to shape and adjust arguments casuistically to the circumstances. Eloquence and the ars rhetorica are, thus, indispensible to politics as an art of persuading or moving others to undertake or support a course of action. ⁷⁵ In The Prince, Machiavelli engaged in a highly controversial reckoning and redescription of the political virtues and vices, as noted above. The way he did so was precisely by employing the rhetorical arts, combining reason (ratio) and eloquence (oratio) to demonstrate ‘the effective truth of the matter [alla verità effettuale della cosa]’. ⁷⁶ He understood the power of words to introduce new understandings and produce new legitimations, for example, by revealing how those things that seem or are conventionally seen as virtuous, such as generosity, mercy and keeping promises, may actually be harmful to a state. ⁷⁷

In twenty-first-century parlance, Machiavelli was ‘pushing the envelope’. No mere scholarly exercise, he wanted to transform the language and practice of politics and encourage an understanding of politics (as ‘the art of state’) that draws upon rhetoric, experience and historical example more than strictures of moral philosophy, ⁷⁸ hence his emphasis on the ‘deeds of great men’ who succeeded in achieving their political ends. ⁷⁹ As a political thinker and actor, Machiavelli clearly recognized that any decision in politics – moral decisions included – cannot be constrained by the general application of theoretical principles in the abstract. Strict adherence to moral or political principles is imprudent and dangerous in a context of changing circumstances and the force of necessity. ⁸⁰

Third, this contextualist approach disabuses us of the assumption that past thinkers, insofar as they were onto something important, were occupied by the same questions that occupy us today. R. G. Collingwood’s realization that ‘the history of political theory is not the history of different answers given to the same question, but the history of a problem more or less constantly changing, whose solution was changing with it’, ⁸¹ epitomizes the contextualist critique of what Vico called the ‘conceit of scholars’ and under which the charge of ‘presentism’ might be filed. ⁸²

For contextualists, the point is not to empty the mind when approaching past thinkers but, as far as possible, to empty the mind of present categories and assumptions in an effort ‘to see things their way’. ⁸³ Bringing our modern conception of the sovereign state to a reading of The Prince would be of little help in trying to understand what Machiavelli meant by lo stato (the state), il principato (the principality) or la repubblica (the republic). As Harvey Mansfield, J. H. Hexter, Skinner and Vivanti have decisively shown, Machiavelli’s conception of the state (‘lo stato’) should not be confused with the modern state conceived as an abstract, impersonal entity separate from both the ruler and ruled (à la Hobbes), even if there are moments when the word is used in something approximating that sense. ⁸⁴

Modern normative expectations about the state’s purpose would be equally out of place in an attempt to understand Machiavelli since in The Prince, at least, he does not think of lo stato as realizing a prior moral or philosophical principle such as reason, democracy, justice or even popular sovereignty. To so attribute such a modern conception of state to the Florentine secretary would be mistaken. More accurate is Hexter’s argument that in The Prince, ‘there is no justification for the relation of the prince to lo stato. There can be none because lo stato is not [in The Prince] a matrix of values, a body politic’, it is rather the means by which a prince acquires and maintains his rule. ⁸⁵ Machiavelli’s argument was echoed in his close friend Francesco Guicciardini’s statement that ‘One cannot maintain states according to conscience [Non si può tenere stati secondo conscienza]’. ⁸⁶

It will always be possible to criticize politics with philosophical resources; but politics has resources and reasons to remain impervious to those philosophical attacks. What we find, when Machiavelli’s Prince is located more firmly in the local intellectual context of Renaissance Europe and if we were to go further and situate the second chancellor in his Florentine institutional context, is that Machiavelli rejected philosophical or normative attempts to ground or justify politics and the state. These were in no need of philosophical foundation. Politics had, or at least created, its own non-philosophical foundations.

At this point, it is worth making two final points about contextualism. First, contextualism was a practice of historians and philologists and a weapon of intellectual combat long before the Cambridge School or what some theorists refer to as ‘modernist’ historicism emerged. ⁸⁷ The critical historical and philological methods developed by Renaissance scholars were precisely what allowed Valla to denounce the Donation of Constantine as a forgery. Valla exposed what he called the ‘various contradictions, impossibilities, stupidities, barbarisms, and absurdities’ in the document by rhetorical and philological means. ⁸⁸ The papacy’s claim to have been gifted the Western empire was inherently implausible by any political reckoning, he argued, but more decisively it was the rebarbative and anachronistic Latinity of the text that betrayed its composition in the eighth century, centuries after Constantine’s death. ⁸⁹

Second, there is nothing in contextualism that prevents recognition of historical continuity even in different historical contexts. It really just depends on the level of abstraction. Valla’s attack on scholastic philosophers was not the same as Thomasius’ attack on scholastic philosophers; it was motivated by different interests and conducted with a different intellectual arsenal. Different arguments were mobilized; the specific problems were different; the concrete political, socio-cultural and institutional contexts were different; and so on. However, both Valla and Thomasius wanted to defend philological and empirical historical methods as ways of grasping the past and shedding historical light on the present. Both thought scholastic-Aristotelian metaphysics not just inept in the historical task of grasping the past but also incapable of the kinds of prudential judgement required in governing public affairs. So it can be legitimately said that Valla and Thomasius participated in an ongoing intellectual battle, even if the details of their skirmishes varied according to the times. In short, contextualism does not commit the intellectual historian to a blanket denial of trans-historical engagement between thinkers of different periods. It does, however, commit the intellectual historian to an investigation of the specific elements of reception and points of engagement.

Conclusion

Quentin Skinner has suggested that ‘one of the contributions that historians can make is to offer us a kind of exorcism’. ⁹⁰ If IR theory has become bewitched by philosophy, as I have suggested, then history has an important role to play in helping us appreciate how our present predicament reflects an unfinished and unwinnable intellectual battle. There is no position above the battle, as Skinner remarks. ⁹¹ No philosophy can supply the intellectual resources for the desired triumph or transcendence. But we might be able to obtain some distance from the present by contextualizing it and by historicizing attempts to find politics and international relations either as academic disciplines or as practical activities under philosophy’s watchful superintendence.

In particular, intellectual history can disclose the historicity of prevailing assumptions and concepts of international relations and of theory, more generally. The archaeological ‘acts of excavation’ ⁹² made possible by contextualist historical methods may help us see that theory was not always conducted in abstract and normative socio-philosophical registers and that our presently dominant theories may obscure the original provenance and meaning of key concepts and the value of non-philosophical modes of theorizing. The excursus to Machiavelli serves as a reminder of the fact that early modern humanist theorizations of politics and international relations felt no compulsion to lay claim to scientific or philosophical truths. Politics, they contended, is a sphere of life with its own vocation, to borrow from Max Weber. ⁹³

The present dominance of theory in philosophical modes is, thus, the outcome, if provisional, of a historic battle waged since at least the fifteenth century. But this battle is often occluded by the apparent triumph of theory in philosophical mode. Rehabilitation of the historical mode of thought can, thus, ‘uncover the often neglected riches of our intellectual heritage and display them once more to view’. ⁹⁴ By bringing ‘buried intellectual treasure’ ⁹⁵ back to the surface, in this case non-philosophical approaches to politics and the historical mode of knowledge itself, we gain a more historically accurate sense of the present and what makes it the same as or different to the past. ⁹⁶ It allows us to see the influence obtained by the high priests of theory and to assess the implications of the ongoing battle in the study of international relations between the descendants of Socrates, who pursue a quest to validate politics and its study philosophically, and those of Thucydides, for whom the quest is a quixotic attempt to remove politics from history.