10 Introduction
a third way for the history of political thought, between the ahistorical study
of a sequence of texts (the “textualists”), on the one hand, and strict, deter-
ministic “contextualism” (i.e. the attribution of every text or idea to specific
historical and/or social needs), on the other. Furthermore, these scholars tried
to apply what was termed above an “emic” approach, placing emphasis on the
questions and issues the political authors themselves were addressing rather
than their relevance to present political science. In other words, the audience
and its expectations must be given equal weight as the author.
Critics of this approach have contended that the “unintended consequences”
of an author’s work are (for the scholar) more important than his intentions, or
that the method described above is irrelevant for present-day politics;34 other
criticisms focus on the “Orientalist” side of seeing political thought in history
as culminating in modern-day European and/or Atlantic preoccupations.35
The basis of this criticism is the issue of the relevance of the past for present-
day problems, a central point in the arguments against the Cambridge School
(Skinner refuted the idea that the history of political thought is the history
of different approaches to humanity’s “perennial questions”, and thus was ac-
cused of “antiquarianism”). However, a reading of early-modern authors with a
view to seeking allies or genealogies of modern trends or problématiques (such
as, for example, liberalism, tolerance, or democracy, to cite the usual suspects
of this method) runs the very real risk of ignoring the historical context and
thus producing obvious anachronisms and misunderstandings.36 After all, our
aim here is to approach Ottoman political thought (or discourse) from the
perspective of a historian rather than a political scientist, with no claims or
attempts whatsoever to interpret modern-day eastern Mediterranean politics.
34 On the “Cambridge School” and its critics see Skinner 1969; Janssen 1985; Åsard 1987;
Pocock 1987; Dunn 1996; Tuck 2001; Hellmuth – von Ehrenstein 2001; Ball 2007; Piterberg
2003, 60–62.
35 For instance, Christopher Goto-Jones recently accused the “Cambridge School” of
Orientalism, arguing not only that these scholars neglected non-European history of
ideas, but also that the very quest for “context” serves as a legitimization of Eurocentrism
(even in the title of Skinner’s famous work, which talks of the foundation of “modern
political thought” rather than “European political thought”): Goto-Jones 2008, esp. 5–8.
It is true that all the major exponents of the Cambridge school were specialized in the
European history of ideas (which cannot be considered a disadvantage anyway); Dunn
1996, 14–16 spares some words for non-European political theories, while Pocock has
written an article on ancient Chinese philosophy. On the other hand, similar criticism
has been launched against the corpus or canon of what is generally considered “political
thought” at large: Stuurman 2000, 154–155. For the problems of applying the methods of
European intellectual history to non-European cultures cf. Pollock 2008.
36 Cf. Neguin Yavari’s review of Alam 2004 in Journal of the American Oriental Society 129.2
(2009), 311–314.