This paper looks at the history of 19th and early 20th century Europe and America through the eyes of leading political and social theorists. The central intellectual tradition represented here is that of Western European liberalism. It is central because it enjoyed an undoubted cultural hegemony, although what is commonly called ‘liberalism’ in Britain is a distinct set of ideas. European liberalism hinged around ideas about constitutional and civil law; then by association ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’, both in itself and in religion; and a strong commitment to academic ‘science’. Concomitantly it promoted all that was ‘bourgeois’ at the expense of what was ‘feudal’. This major tradition is represented above all by Hegel, Durkheim and Weber. Standing outside it there were a number of alternative points of view: the radicals, reactionaries, romantics and socialists who dissented from, but were compelled to engage with, the hegemonic liberal position, as well as the separate Anglophone tradition. Notwithstanding the hiatus inflicted by Fascism, Nazism and world war, and talk ca.1990 about ‘post-modernity’ and the ‘death’ of Marx, attempts by later 20th and 21st century writers to theorise society and politics without substantial reference to their 19th and early 20th century forebears have proven largely unsuccessful. So the authors and period covered in this course remain the undoubted starting point for an understanding of all modern social and political theory down to the present.
As far as the method of study is concerned, the paper is designed for theoretically concerned historians rather than pure theorists. No worthwhile historical approach to a subject such as this should be seen as anti-theoretical. However, our aim is to use history to supply a better, that is, more accurate and realistic, understanding of theory as presented by its greatest exponents; and we leave it to others to re-make and rework past theory for present-day purposes. (An entirely legitimate exercise, but a different one.) The outer limit of inquiry is to try to understand ideas and intellectual tradition within societies taken as a whole, i.e. something much larger than the world of texts alone. But the pragmatic starting point is the study of individual texts and authors deemed to be of outstanding merit and rich in meaning. The class programme tries to capture both the macro- and microscopic perspectives.
