Textbook Outline: History of Political Theory
The academic world needs a revisionist textbook on the history of political theory.
The book should target upper division students who are majoring in political science or history. I have in mind upper division students in 1960, when I took the history of political theory. Maybe they are graduate students today. It should be about 600 pages.
Way back when, a standard textbook was the one I read, which was written by George Sabine. You can buy the 1973 edition in hardback for $8.25. The paperback version costs $5,855.45.
Note: Amazon's pricing algorithm sometimes goes bonkers. This is such a time.
What I recall most about Sabine's textbook was that it was deadly dull. That is the curse of most textbooks, but his abused the privilege.
The textbook should be consistent, cover to cover. Every chapter should survey the five crucial themes of political theory. Students should see that there has been a recurring pattern of five theoretical questions that must be dealt with politically in every society. Students can see the continuity of political life. These are the governing issues of all social theory: sovereignty, hierarchy, law, sanctions, and succession. I teach economics this way. I teach the history of literature this way. I teach government this way. I certainly would teach the history of political theory this way.
The best introduction to this five-point structure is Ray Sutton's book, That You May Prosper (1987). Next, you can read my book: Unconditional Surrender (2011). Here is the structure of this book: God, man, law, sanctions, and time. For a short introduction, you can read my book, God's Covenants (2014). Here is the model: transcendence, hierarchy, ethics, oath, and succession (THEOS). This model will serve you well, no matter what aspect of social theory you investigate. If you don't cover these five issues, you will have missed something fundamental in every form of social theory. These are inescapable concepts. Just for the record, they match both the content and sequence of the Pentateuch: Genesis (transcendence), Exodus (hierarchy), Leviticus (ethics), Numbers (oath/sanctions), and Deuteronomy (succession).
In the field of political theory, these five issues are as follows: sovereignty, authority/hierarchy/representation, law, oath/sanctions, and succession. Every chapter should be structured in terms of these five points. But it goes beyond the structure of the chapters. As my friend Ruben Alvarado pointed out to me in 1989, these five points and this sequence have structured the history of Western civilization.
Here is how I would break down the book into chapters. The sequence of the eras reflects the covenant model. Each era had one of the issues as its central issue, both in theory and in practice.
Hebrews
Greece
Rome: Republic
Rome: Empire
Early church to Constantine (325) -- sovereignty
Byzantine political theory (325-1453) -- hierarchy
Constantine to the Papal Revolution (1076) -- hierarchy
Papal Revolution to Aquinas (1250) -- law
Aquinas to Luther (1517) -- law
Luther to Rousseau (1762) -- oath
Rousseau to Darwin (1859) -- oath
Darwin to present -- succession
Already, you see an anomaly: the chapter on Byzantine political theory. Byzantine civilization is almost never discussed except in extremely specialized courses and extremely small classrooms in upper division and graduate school courses in history. Yet Byzantine civilization developed out of Constantine's settlement in 325. To ignore it is to ignore the history of half of Christian civilization. That is an omission that has been imposed on Western Christians by humanist educators. It was different from the West, and these differences should be discussed. Byzantine civilization maintained the longest gold coin standard currency in the history of the world. This deserves some consideration.
To understand political theory, we also have to understand the political events of the various eras. Theories do not originate and then spread in historical vacuums. This is why there should be a second volume on the history of politics, about the same length, paralleling the volume on the history of political theory. There would therefore be two separate markets for the two books. They would be integrated, but they would generate more money this way.
The most radical aspect of the book is this: there would be no discussion of Plato until Plato becomes influential in the history of political theory: medieval times. He was not influential during the era of classical Greece. He wrote in the name of Socrates, and Athens executed Socrates. We can safely say that Socrates did not have much influence in the political theories of his day.
The book would study Aristotle, but in a limited way. It would study his history of the constitutions of the Greek city-states. It would not go into detail on his political theories, except insofar as they represented the end of classical Greece. He may have taught them to Alexander the Great, who destroyed the Greek city-states, and thereby destroyed Greek political theory.
A chapter would discuss Thucydides' History the Peloponnesian War. It would also cover some of Herodotus. Most of all, it would study the relationship between the polytheistic theology of classical Greece in relation to political theory. This would mean a consideration of Fustel's Ancient City (1864). More obscure, yet crucially important, are the discussions of the gods of the city-states that appear in the writings of archeologist Jane Ellen Harrison, who wrote in the early 1900's. She was the great master of the actual practices of the religion of the Greek city-states. She is rarely quoted, and never in histories of political theory.
Also important would be the chapters on Greece and Rome that appear in R. J. Rushdoony's book, The One and the Many (1971).
Plato and Aristotle became influential in the later Middle Ages. That is when the textbook would discuss their theories.
The standard textbooks want people to believe that Plato and Aristotle were important for the development of political life in early Christian civilization. They were not. Roman law had vastly more influence than the writings of Plato and Aristotle until the 12th century.
Nobody has written a history of political theory anything like this. Some young academic entrepreneur ought to attempt it. It probably would take ten years to write both books, and it might take 20 years. But the effort will be worth it in the long run. It would establish the reputation of the scholar who attempts it.
Why do we need an academic entrepreneur? Because there is going to be unexpected demand for information on political theory over the next half century.
I believe that the era of nationalism is going to recede. We are going to see the fiscal bankruptcies of many national governments in the West because of the financial burdens of state-funded retirement programs, including government-funded medicine. There is going to be a breakup of the national governments, at least operationally. We are going back to something resembling the localism of the medieval world. Read Jacques Barzun, From Dawn To Decadence (2000), Conclusion, and Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (1999), Conclusion. But, unlike the Middle Ages in the West after the fall of Rome, we will maintain modern productivity. Production will be decentralized. This is already taking place. 3-D printing is going to be part of this. We are going to see the economic equivalents of semi-autonomous medieval cities and townships.
There will be demand for some kind of political theory which integrates the technological unification of the Internet with the technological decentralization of the Internet. There is no such theory today.