The Nature of Political Theory

40 The Nature of Political Theory

was made by national historians for national ends.^23 History was neither focused on
modern debate nor social criticism. Contemporary history was avoided. Events and
texts were ‘frozen with meanings for national ends’ (Soffer 1994: 36).^24 Training for
students was largely concerned with character formation and good citizenship. The
employers of many of these graduates in Britain, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, were the India and Colonial Services, diplomatic core and general
civil service. Employers wanted graduates with a strong sense of communal ideals and
national rectitude. Universities consequently ‘successfully transformed a set of values
encoded in the concept of “liberal education” into a licensing system for a national
elite’ (Soffer 1994: 6; see also Condren 1985: 36, n.5).
The same individuals who constructed the history curriculum also promoted the
history of political theory. In other words, history set thetoneof histories of polit-
ical theory. Consequently, the history of political theory did have a definite role and
function, from its inception, and, in fact, well into the twentieth century. This role is
something that has been praised, vilified, submerged, and often resurrected. Loosely
described, first, it would inform students about an ongoing tradition of ‘great’ indi-
vidual thinkers, identified with their ‘classic texts’. The concept tradition is deployed,
often coupled with a progressive teleology, to hold the whole enterprise together. The
great classic texts are marked out for their originality, their systematic coherence,
intellectual and moral influence, and the manner in which they dealt with the great
perennialproblems of political existence; second, to instruct students—through the
texts—in the great questions and universal moral virtues; third, to educate (overtly
or covertly) readers, in national ideals and culture; fourth, to inform them about
the way the state has developed (usually in a teleological progressive manner leading
up to the twentieth-century liberal democratic state). The genealogy of this whole
academic enterprise is comparatively short, a fact that frequently goes unnoticed.
The first text, with secure claims on this approach, was Robert Blakey’s two-volume
workA History of Political Literature from the Earliest Times(1855). No doubt back-
ground models for this approach were histories of philosophy and literature. In
fact, Blakey viewed the history of political theory as a sub-category of the more
general notion of ‘literature’. In British universities, the history of political theory
emerged falteringly in curricula from the 1870s, usually under the rubric of the
moral sciences, history or jurisprudence, and usually from the prompting of his-
torians with comparativist interests, such as Seeley, Pollock, Maitland, and Acton.
However, it did not develop vigorously in Britain until the twentieth century.^25 The
idea was, however, initially, more self-consciously prosecuted in North America,
where politics departments had a more autonomous self-conscious existence from
the 1880s. From this period, texts of history of political thought expanded in num-
ber in both Britain and America, for a growing market of courses. As one scholar
has remarked, on the growth in such texts between 1880 and 1940, that what has
now become the traditional objective canon of texts seems to have been itself partly
the product of ‘the demand for undergraduate textbooks’ (Boucher 1989b: 224). In
Britain, though, most were still produced initially in history departments well into
the 1950s.