Historical Perspectives on the Meanings and Challenges of Pluralism (1355-1752)

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

As Nancy Rosenblum (2008) has compellingly argued, the history of Western political thought is permeated by the reluctance to envision politics as a genuinely pluralistic enterprise. Pluralism – a shining star in the firmament of values and ideals of contemporary liberal democracies – was anathema to most ancient and early-modern thinkers, whose organic analogy between the human and the political body alerted them to the disruptiveness of heterogenous claims and the potentially fatal threat posed by competing social, political, and religious groups. Holism, not pluralism, was the underlying principle of a stable political order in a world ignited by civil strives and religious wars.
At the core of this holistic vision of politics was a crucial distinction–that between parts and factions–which was at once etymological and semantic. From the Latin verb “partire” (‘to divide’), ‘part’ originally lacked any political connotation; as an analytical term, it described the separation of an element from its broader whole. On the contrary, ‘factions’ (from the Latin verb “facere”: ‘to do’) had a more practical meaning and a distinctive evaluative undertone; it referred to a group of individuals committed to ruthless behavior and harmful deeds, united in the attempt to destabilize their political community (Sartori 1976).
Parts – not yet parties – had their legitimate place in the holistic mindset of the ancients and early moderns alike, as far as they would not draw off loyalty to the primacy of the collective. Already in “Politics”–a text that was translated into Latin for the first time in the mid-1260s and thus significantly influenced the “imaginaire” of the early Renaissance–Aristotle had differentiated parts (“mère”) from factions (“stàseis”), describing the city as a conglomeration of several parts– individuals, families, villages–each serving an end that coincided with that of the whole. Factions disfigured the natural order of political life, pursuing aims that were not generalizable and indeed antithetic to those of the whole.
While the distinction between parts and factions had long been established, the one between parties (not simply parts) and factions was more elusive. The word “party” entered the political lexicon when its longstanding predecessor – “sect” (from the Latin verb “secare”: to cut) – acquired a specific religious meaning in the 17th century with regards to Protestant sectarianism. “Party” initially took on the pejorative meaning of its semantic ancestor (partisan divisions as secularized schisms) and it was not until Bolingbroke (late 1730s-early 1740s), Hume (1740s-1750s), and, most decisively, Burke (1770) that the concepts of “parties” and “factions” were finally disentangled.
Our panel draws on this long history of a prejudice – the one of the partisans of holism against pluralism – to both excavate some of its key junctures and explore the multiple meanings of pluralism (political, religious, scientific) in the way it was either advocated or execrated between the 14th and the 18th century. By doing so, the four papers suggest new readings of major authors and/or draw attention to lesser-known texts in the attempt to bring perspectives from political history, intellectual history, and the history of political thought to bear on contemporary questions about the value and challenges of pluralism across domains of life.
The panel will follow a chronological order. First, David Ragazzoni (Columbia) will offer a contextual and critical analysis of Bartolus’ treaty “On Guelphs and Ghibellines” (c. 1355) to unearth one of the earliest attempts to accept political pluralism at the institutional level and theorize the virtues of by-partyism inside the legislative. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Cambridge) will focus on a posthumous publication by Francis Bacon – his experimental natural history “Sylva Sylvarum” (1626/7) – to retrieve the scientific pluralism of the experiments envisioned by Bacon, explore their neglected political dimension, and explain how a reinterpretation of this work may suggest new readings of Bacon’s famous political utopia in “New Atlantis”. Alyson McQueen (Stanford) will draw attention to the “rhetoric of moderation” in Hobbes’ work as a deeply polemical strategy in the broader context of appeals to political and religious moderation in early modern England. Finally, Danielle Charette (Chicago) will focus on David Hume’s final political essay, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” (1752) and its proposal of a federal and bicameral republic, to read it as a Montesquieian answer to Harrington’s “Oceana” – that is, as Hume’s design for political debate and contestation in his “perfect” republic.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Individual Presentations

• An Early Theory of Institutional Bi-Partyism: Bartolus’ De Guelphis et Gebellinis - David Ragazzoni, Columbia University

• Baconian Political Experiments - Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge

• Hobbes's Strategy of Convergence - Alison McQueen, Stanford University

• David Hume’s Court of Competitors - Danielle Charette, University of Virginia

Chair

• Glory M. Liu Harvard University

Discussants

• Kinch Hoekstra University of California, Berkeley

• Glory M. Liu Harvard University