The historical approach and its help in understanding political ideologies

Introduction

The question has two parts: what the historical approach to political theory is, and in what way it improves our understanding of political ideologies. The approach builds theory on the resources of history, and ideologies are creatures of history, so the connection is close. It is one of the three approaches listed in Unit II of the syllabus.

The historical approach

The historical approach builds political theory out of the resources of history. Its leading exponent, Sabine, held that the question what is political theory? is best answered descriptively, by showing how theory has responded to historical events and situations: each historical situation sets a problem and theory is the solution devised for it, so theory is situation-dependent and deferential to tradition. Cobban likewise maintained that the traditional mode, steeped in a sense of history, is the right way to treat the problems of political theory. The syllabus lists it as one of the three approaches of Unit II alongside the normative and the empirical. Its method is the reading of past theory in its setting: the works of earlier thinkers are studied as solutions to the problems their own situations set, and the syllabus prescribes for this unit a reading on history and the interpretation of texts.

What it contributes. (1) The past acts as a guide and warns us against exaggerating our originality. (2) It shows that thought can be otherwise than the fashionable and the dominant, and it reveals the sources of ideas. (3) It makes us aware of the failings of earlier generations and joins them to present wisdom. (4) It feeds the normative vision: knowing where our values and expectations came from lets us interrogate and assess them.

Its limits. Each situation is unique and brings new challenges, so the worth of the past can become redundant and even a hindrance, and the approach is always tied to ideas of earlier ages; its suggestive value remains but its theoretical function recedes. An exclusive reliance on history also led to what Easton called historicism, the habit of tracing the origin and social impact of values without asking whether they are sound; this was one of the reasons given for the decline of political theory. Easton laid this charge on Dunning, McIlwain and Sabine, arguing that a theory concerned only with historical forms had lost its constructive role.

Understanding political ideologies

An ideology is a systematic and all-embracing doctrine about human nature and society with a programme of action. The historical approach helps in the following ways.

1. It shows where ideologies come from. Liberalism arose as a protest against hierarchy, privilege and the absolute authority of kings during the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of a market society; it is the voice of a rising middle class. Conservatism developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in reaction to the pace of change set off by the French Revolution. Marxism has its roots in the analysis of capitalism as a stage of history, which Marx explained through historical materialism, and it had predecessors, the utopian socialists, before Marx.
2. It reveals how ideologies change. Liberalism passed from classical laissez-faire to the welfare state and then to neo-liberalism, as the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the working class, two world wars and the stagnation of the 1970s altered conditions. The term conservatism has itself carried different meanings, at times opposition to every change and at times an attempt to rebuild an earlier form of society. The history of the idea shows that none is a fixed system.
3. It protects against anachronism and dogma. An ideology claims to offer a final or universal truth; history shows each one as an answer to a specific time. The unit notes that a distinctive trait of ideology is its dogmatism, which discourages critical appraisal.
4. It enables critical assessment. The history of ideas tells us that our values and norms have roots in the past and how they arose, and so we can interrogate and judge them. The Marxist view that a proletarian revolution cannot take place and succeed before capitalism, and with it the forces of production, has matured became a subject of dispute when revolutions occurred in backward societies; knowing that history helps judge the doctrine.
5. It links ideologies to each other. Marxism, feminism, conservatism and postmodernism are partly reactions to liberalism and to each other; liberalism is criticised for bourgeois character by Marxists and for male norms by feminists, and postmodernism criticises the grand narratives of both liberalism and Marxism.

Limits. A historical account explains the origin of an ideology, but not by itself whether it is right. Tracing an ideology to the interests of a class can slide into dismissing it as nothing more than that class's interest. This is the concern that led to the criticism of historicism.

Conclusion

The historical approach makes political theory a study of ideas in their setting. For understanding ideologies it explains their birth, development and transformation, and keeps them from being taken as timeless. It needs the normative approach to judge them and the empirical approach to test their claims.