Institutions, Ideologies, and Comparative Political Theory
Joshua Simon
[email protected]
The place for the study of historical political writings within the discipline of political science
has been contested for several decades. The disagreement amongst the multiple parties to the debate
is not primarily substantive. Political theorists pour over their canon of acknowledged greats in
search of insights into the origins and purposes of government, ideal and real institutional designs,
and paths toward political stability, economic prosperity, and human happiness—the same issues, in
other words, that occupy all political scientists. Rather, the problem is methodological, or, more
precisely, the problem stems from the contending camps’ divergent orientations to methodology. In
his famous 1969 philippic, “Political Theory as a Vocation”, Sheldon Wolin described and
denounced the discipline’s ascendant “methodism,” warning that excessive preoccupation with the
“refinement of specific techniques” for studying politics would “reinforce an uncritical view of
existing political structures,” making political science “unpolitical.” Methodism deprived the field of
any aspiration or ability to inform or guide action that aimed, not to manipulate established
institutions and empirical regularities, but to change them.1
Though it is beyond the intentions or capacities of the present essay to argue the case
systematically, I would observe here that subsequent history certainly seems to have borne out
Wolin’s dire warnings concerning the discipline of political science. Political scientists are today even
more intensely occupied by manifestly “unpolitical” matters of method than they were half a century
ago. But, notably, methodism has advanced not in spite of, but perhaps in part because political
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation”, The American Political Science Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (Dec., 1969),
1062-64.
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theorists have heeded Wolin’s instructions so abstemiously. Today, political theorists are embarrassed
to even raise questions concerning method.2 And while approaches developed in adjacent
disciplines—especially history, philosophy, and comparative literature—are dexterously adapted to
serve political theorists’ purposes, the discipline of political science itself contributes nothing
methodologically distinctive to political theorists’ studies of historical texts, and political theorists for
the most part decline to highlight the contributions that their work on the history of political
thought makes to literatures in other subfields of political science. Since Wolin wrote, political
theorists have become less and not more capable of pursuing their critical vocation, having been
forced into a precarious defensive position by their colleagues’ regular suggestions that the study of
the history of political thought should be banished to the humanities.3
In this article I describe a comparative approach to the history of political thought that
draws upon the methods of comparative political science without succumbing to methodism’s depoliticizing tendencies. Indeed, I shall argue that comparison offers political theorists a means of
grounding their critiques of existing institutions in rigorous scholarship on historical ideas. The
approach I propose is inspired by the growing field of “comparative political theory”. Below, I
briefly review the literature in this exciting new area of research, noting the influence of several
important “schools” familiar from methodological debates within the history of political thought. I
argue that neither the interpretive methods of Hans-Georg Gadamer, nor the historical method of
Quentin Skinner, nor the philosophical method of Leo Strauss lends itself well to a truly
comparative political theory. By contrast, I suggest, the now relatively defunct approach adumbrated
by Karl Marx, which treats political ideas as ideologies, is more promising in this regard.
See, for example: Jeffrey Edward Green, “Political Theory as both Philosophy and History: A Defense against
Methodological Militancy”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 18 (2015), 426.
3 Andrew Rehfeld, “Offensive Political Theory”, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 8, no. 2 (June 2010), 465-486.
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Next, drawing upon efforts to incorporate the study of ideas into the conceptual framework
of historical institutionalism, I offer a revised account of political ideas as ideologies, proposing that
we treat a given political thinker’s thoughts as having been caused by the background problems that
he or she set out to solve. I argue that these background problems are the products of an interaction
between the institutional and intellectual contexts that every political thinker always occupies, and
describe how individual political thoughts emerge from these contexts and contribute to their
revision over time.
In the third section, I show how the comparative method employed by qualitative political
scientists and comparative-historical sociologists could assist political theorists aiming to explain
variation in political ideas across space and time by reference to their thinkers’ background
problems. I devote particular attention to the issue of case selection, adapting John Stuart Mill’s
famous Methods of “Difference” and “Similarity” to the problem of explaining points of ideological
convergence and divergence amongst political thinkers who occupied similar or different
institutional and intellectual contexts.
In the fourth section, I provide an illustration of the comparative and institutional approach
to the history of political thought, proposing an explanation for the paradoxical coexistence of
liberal, republican, and anti-imperial political ideas with racist, hierarchical, and imperial political
commitments in the history of American political thought. I defend this explanation by comparing
prominent political thinkers active during the independence movements of the United States and
Spanish America.
Finally, in concluding, I show how a comparative approach to the study of political ideas
would complement existing approaches to the history of political thought, providing a bridge from
the study of past ideas to contemporary debates in normative political theory, and drawing political
theorists into closer dialogue with other political scientists.
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Comparative Political Theory
Amongst the most compelling recent developments in the study of political ideas has been
the emergence and growth of “comparative political theory,” a diverse literature unified by its
contributors’ attention to traditions of political thought that have not traditionally been studied by
Western European and North American political theorists. Rejecting the global intellectual
hegemony that has accompanied Western Europe and North America’s military and economic
dominance of the globe, comparative political theorists have highlighted the distinctive questions
that animate Asian, African, and Latin American traditions of political thought, the original insights
contained within their texts, and the compelling challenges their thinkers have posed to what
political theorists sometimes present as settled orthodoxies.4 The most ambitious calls for a
comparative political theory have envisioned the improved understanding of “non-Western”
political ideas that the approach would generate as an important aspect of a broader political
program pursuing “global democratic cooperation over oligarchic or imperial control and dialogical
interaction over hegemonic unilateralism and monologue.”5
But if the motivations for a comparative political theory are clear and, indeed, admirable, its
methodologies—the scholarly processes and techniques that comparative political theorists employ
in their studies—are less well-established. In an influential early statement, Anthony Parel argued
that “the comparative study of political philosophy … is nothing other than the process, first, of
identifying the ‘equivalences’,” the similarities in key ideas or concepts that appear in texts on
politics from different cultural or historical contexts, “and second, of understanding their
significance.” Parel provides several examples of what he has in mind—“the Aristotelian politikos and
For a recent review, see: Diego von Vacano, “The Scope of Comparative Political Theory” Annual Review of Political
Science vol. 18 (2015), 465-80.
5 Fred Dallmayr “Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory”, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 2, no. 2 (June,
2004), 254. See also: Melissa S. Williams and Mark E. Warren, “A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory”
Political Theory, vol. 42, no. 1 (January, 2014), 26-57.
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the Confucian junzi, Indian dharma and the pre-modern western notion of ‘natural justice’, the
Islamic prophet-legislator and the Platonic philosopher-king”—but he says little about how we
should choose texts to search for equivalences or about how to draw implications from their
presence or absence.6
In another seminal study, Roxanne Euben puts something like Parel’s proposal into practice,
describing parallels between the Islamist philosopher Sayyid Qutb’s “moral indictment of postEnlightenment political theories … that assume the exclusion of religious authority from the
political realm” and the political thought of Western philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles
Taylor, and Robert Bellah, “who are similarly concerned with the ways in which rupture with
tradition and transcendent foundations has resulted in crises in authority, morality, and community.”
Euben argues that uncovering this equivalence “enables us to see past the alienness” of Islamic
fundamentalism, and recognize Qutb as “one voice in a larger conversation on rationalism and the
modern condition, a conversation in which we too participate.”7 This is a fascinating perspective,
but the comparison leaves us wondering why these Islamic and Western thinkers converged on a
shared indictment of atheistic rationalism. Are shared intellectual influences at work? Or are these
political thinkers, despite the geographic and temporal distance between them, responding to similar
political problems within their respective societies?
Euben explicitly considers and rejects the idea that “fundamentalism is a reflex reaction to
certain political or socioeconomic circumstances”, insisting that “the increasing strength of
fundamentalism … is at least partly related to the specific appeal of fundamentalist ideas.”8 We
Anthony J. Parel, “The Comparative Study of Political Philosophy” in Anthony J. Parel and Ronald C. Keith, eds.,
Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies Under the Upas Tree 2nd ed. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 12.
7 Roxanne L. Euben, “Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist Critique of Rationalism” Journal of
Politics, vol. 59, no. 1, (1997) 31 and 53. See also: Euben “Premodern, Antimodern or Postmodern? Islamic and Western
Critiques of Modernity” Review of Politics, vol. 59, no. 3 (1997), 429-60; and Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic
Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism. A Work of Comparative Political Theory. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
8 Euben, “Comparative Political Theory”, 30
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might doubt, though, whether the comparison she conducts can actually demonstrate this
contention. Comparative political scientists apply well-articulated, if diverse, standards when
choosing cases for comparison so that they can address alternative possible explanations for the
phenomena they hope to explain. Adapting these standards might have helped increase our
confidence in the explanation Euben provides for the equivalences that she very effectively
documents, and thereby deepened our understanding of contemporary religious conservatism
generally and of Islamic fundamentalism in particular.
Euben’s study of Islamic and Western critiques of modernity exemplifies comparative
political theory’s ambiguous relationship with comparative political science. While comparative
political theorists have adopted the latter’s “comparative” moniker as a description of their work,
they have not adopted its methods. Instead, in their efforts to understand texts written far away,
comparative political theorists have employed approaches developed in order to understand texts
written long ago. The methodological debate within comparative political theory has come resemble
the clash of “schools” contending over the best way to study the history of political thought.9 For
different, and instructive reasons, the influence of these schools has made actual comparisons
marginal if not entirely absent in comparative political theory.
Thus far, the most influential school within comparative political theory has been the
philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. This is in many ways unsurprising. Gadamer’s
well-known observation that modern scholars’ interpretations of historical texts or objects will
always be “determined by the prejudices that [they] bring with [them],”10 would seem to apply with
equal if not greater force to Western political theorists’ attempts to understand ideas originating in
non-Western philosophical traditions. Raimundo Panikkar and Fred Dallmayr place Gadamer’s
For expert accounts and defenses of these schools, see George Klosko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political
Thought (Oxford University Press, 2011), 11-46.
10 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 2nd Revised Edition. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall
(Continuum Publishing, 1999), 306.
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solution to this problem—the dialectical “fusion of horizons,” past and present—at the center of
their own “dialogical” approaches to comparative philosophy and comparative political theory,
respectively.11
Farah Godrej deepens these arguments, recommending that comparative political theorists
adopt a “hermeneutic of existential understanding”, which acknowledges that “the ideas in a text
cannot simply be understood by an analysis of the concepts in the text itself; rather [understanding]
requires a praxis-oriented existential transformation in which the reader herself learns to live by the
very ideas expressed in a text.”12 This procedure, though certainly responsive to important problems
arising in the interpretation of unfamiliar political thinkers, is extraordinarily onerous, setting such a
high bar for the interpretation of any one text that the prospect of a comparison recedes into the
background or is rejected outright. And indeed, though the comparative method would seem to
demand certain separation and distance between comparing subject and compared objects, for
Godrej, comparative political theory demands “precisely that the reader not see herself as separate
from the text and that the subject not gaze at the object from a distance, attempting to achieve a
scholarly objectivity in one’s understanding.”13 If adopted, this directive would seem to render
comparison, even in the limited sense of a ‘search for equivalences’, impossible.
Similar impediments to comparison arise in approaches to comparative political theory
inspired by Quentin Skinner’s “contextual” method for studying the history of political thought. For
Skinner, a given political idea or text is “inescapably the embodiment of a particular intention on a
particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem, and is thus specific to its
context in a way that it can only be naïve to try to transcend.” In order “to understand what a writer
Raimundo Panikkar, “What is Comparative Philosophy Comparing?” in Gerald J . Larson and Eliot Deutsch, eds.,
Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 116-36;
and Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue”, 250-2.
12 Farah Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other”, Polity, vol.
41, no. 2 (April, 2009), 140.
13 Ibid., 141.
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may have been doing in using some particular concept or argument, we need first of all to grasp the
nature and range of things that could recognizably have been done by using that particular concept,
in the treatment of that particular theme, at that particular time.” More generally, “the aim is to see
such texts as contributions to particular discourses, and … to return the specific texts we study to
the precise cultural contexts in which they were originally formed.”14 The emphasis here, it should
be clear, is on particularity; for Skinner, our understanding of a given tract or discourse improves with
every improvement in our ability to uncover contemporaneous linguistic and rhetorical practices,
reconstruct the immediate context of philosophical debate, and ascertain the author’s individual
objectives.
Similarly, for Leigh Jenco, the most important impediment to understanding non-Western
texts is Western scholars’ failure to absorb a background environment that renders the concepts
contained within the text intelligible. Adequate interpretation of unfamiliar ideas will often require
scholars to reconstruct not only the discursive context of a foreign text, but also the “practices that
complement text-based interpretive traditions, or that constitute traditions of their own—practices
like imitation, ritual, dance, or other forms of nonverbal expression.”15 Again, this is a point worth
taking seriously, but the obstacles it places in the path of a comparative political theory are
substantial. Comparison requires abstraction and generalization, the systematic reduction of details
surrounding a given act of political thinking that permits us to grasp what different thinkers shared
or did not share in terms of context and motivation and how their ideas converged or diverged as a
result.
Finally, though few comparative political theorists have explicitly taken their methodological
bearings from Leo Strauss, many studies aim less at situating non-Western texts within particular
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics I: Regarding Method (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88, 102, and 125.
Leigh Kathryn Jenco, “‘What Does Heaven Ever Say?’ A Methods-centered Approach to Cross-cultural Engagement”
The American Political Science Review, vol. 101, no. 4 (November, 2007), 744.
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discursive or cultural contexts, than at discerning and evaluating the solutions that non-Western
political philosophers have offered for what Strauss described as the “fundamental problems” of
Western political philosophy.16 For comparative political theory, the issue here is basically a mirror
image of the one encountered in relation to Skinner’s approach. Comparison, as I noted, would
require generalization and abstraction away from particular contexts, but Strauss’s proposal is so
thoroughgoing in this regard that it eliminates context entirely, and with it the possibility of
observing how ideas vary in response to their thinkers’ surroundings. The basic questions we might
attempt to answer using a comparative approach – questions about why similar or different ideas
arose in similar or different settings – are replaced by a single-minded concern with the truth or
falsity of different thinkers’ different answers to a perennial and universal set of questions. This
might be a way to take past or foreign thinkers’ ideas “seriously”, in Strauss’s terms, but it will serve
no better than Gadamer or Skinner’s methods as the basis for a comparative political theory.
We come somewhat closer to what we seek in an approach to the history of political thought
that boasts relatively few adherents today, and which has had almost no discernable influence on
comparative political theory: Marxian ideology critique, or what Neal Wood once called “the social
history of political theory”.17 Perhaps the best-known example of this approach to the history of
political thought is C.B. Macpherson’s Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, which argued that the
major assumptions, contentions, and inconsistencies of seventeenth-century English political
thought reflected and, indeed, legitimated a contemporaneously emergent “market society”
characterized by individual ownership of freely-alienable labor and inequalities in the distribution of
wealth and political power. Thomas Hobbes, the radical political theorists associated with the
Levellers, James Harrington, and John Locke, for all their differences, all endorsed similar
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 23-4. Consider, for example, Jon
D. Carlson and Russell Arben Fox, eds., The State of Nature in Comparative Political Thought: Western and Non-Western
Perspectives (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
17 Neal Wood, “The Social History of Political Theory”, Political Theory, Vol. 6, No. 3 (August, 1978), 345-367.
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conceptions of individual freedom and entailed rights to the product of one’s labor, which provided
ideological support for the capitalist mode of production while undermining alternative notions of
morality and virtue that might be employed in critiques of capitalism.18
Two features of Macpherson’s approach make it more amenable to the comparative method
than Gadamer, Skinner, or Strauss’s. First, Macpherson establishes a clearer distinction between the
context that is to do the explaining – the rise of the market society – and the idea – “possessive
individualism” – to be explained. Ellen Meiksins Wood nicely summarizes the difference between
this approach to ‘contextualization’ and that of Skinner’s “Cambridge School”, noting that for the
latter,
The social context is itself intellectual, or at least the ‘social’ is defined by, and only by,
existing vocabularies. The ‘political life’ that sets the agenda for theory is essentially a
language game. In the end, to contextualize a text is to situate it among other texts, among a
range of vocabularies, discourses and ideological paradigms at various levels of formality,
from the classics of political thought down to ephemeral screeds or political speeches. What
emerges from Skinner’s assault on purely textual histories or the abstract history of ideas is
yet another kind of textual history, yet another history of ideas – certainly more sophisticated
and comprehensive than what went before, but hardly less limited to disembodied texts.19
By contrast, Macpherson’s Marxian approach places more emphasis on the ‘political’ in political
thought, “directing attention towards the relationship between political theorizing and the political
objectives of parties or classes within society”.20 In this sense, it fits much better into the framework
of independent and dependent, or explanatory and outcome, variables that underlies comparative
social science.
C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London: Verso, 2008), 8-9.
20 Richard Ashcraft, “Political Theory and the Problem of Ideology” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 42, No. 3 (August, 1980),
694.
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Second, and again in contrast to the Cambridge School, though Macpherson provides an
extensive, detailed, and well-documented history of seventeenth-century England,21 he does so in
order to construct a generalizable “model” – the emergent possessive market society22 – that could
be held up against the histories of other times and places undergoing similar transitions. The political
thought of individuals inhabiting these times and places could then be searched for ideas resembling
possessive individualism. If something analogous were found, Macpherson’s claim that Hobbes,
Locke, and the Levellers’ political thought was a reflection of the political context in which they
lived would be strengthened. Conversely, the absence of any equivalences to possessive
individualism in the political ideas that have arisen in other incipient capitalist societies would
strengthen the position of Macpherson’s many critics.23 Below, I elaborate upon the procedures that
one might follow in order to make an argument along either of these lines, but first, I develop an
alternative account of how exactly political ideas relate to the political contexts in which they arise,
which builds upon the Marxian concept of ideology, while forgoing some of its assumptions.
Institutional and Intellectual Contexts
Comparison is, amongst other things, a powerful method of causal inference, a means of testing the
validity of proposed explanations for why some event or events of interest occurred or did not occur.
Here, I describe a comparative approach to the history of political thought with a similar aim in
mind, but this raises immediate questions: in what sense can political ideas be said to have been
caused? What is entailed in explaining why a given thought appeared where and when it did?
I propose a minimal, and, I hope, minimally controversial answer to these questions: political
ideas are caused by the background problems that their thinkers set out to solve. Explaining why a
See, in particular, the “Appendix”, in Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 279-92.
Ibid. 53-61.
23 See James Tully, “After the Macpherson Thesis”, in An Approach to Political Theory: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993) for a useful review of the large critical literature.
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political thinker thought what he or she did involves reconstructing the background problems that
he or she aimed to address when he or she wrote or spoke as he or she did.24 These background
problems are, in turn, products of an interaction between two sorts of context that all political
thinkers always occupy: an institutional context and an intellectual context.
Institutional Contexts
By institutional context I mean the formal and informal rules that structure social interactions in
the community where the political thinker whose thoughts we wish to explain lives, thinks, and
writes or speaks. I make two important assumptions regarding institutional contexts. First, following
Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, I assume that all political thinkers always occupy a “full” or
“plenary” institutional context: one in which rules governing social interactions exist, whether they
are written or unwritten, and agents exist that enforce these rules, whether by physical force or other
means of social suasion.25 No political thinker, in other words, has ever occupied a “state of nature”
void of any institutions; the political thinkers that have availed themselves of various forms of this
famous thought experiment did so from within thoroughly institutionalized contexts, which
contributed to producing the background problems that caused them to think and write the way that
they did.
Second, following Jack Knight and James Mahoney, I assume that, in general, institutions exist
not as cooperative solutions to collective action problems, but as outcomes of conflicts over the
distribution of political power, economic resources, and social prominence. Actors or groups of
actors devise and enforce the rules that make up an institutional context in order to secure
Though the language of causality here is new, the connection suggested between political ideas and background
“problems” or “dilemmas” is not; see, for example, Michael Rosen, “The History of Ideas as Philosophy and History”
History of Political Thought, vol. 22, no. 4 (Winter, 2011); and Bevir, Logic of the History of Ideas, 221-64.
25 Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 22-24.
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distributional advantages at the expense of other actors or groups of actors. When compared with an
alternative set of institutions, these institutions may or may not be “socially efficient”. That is, they
may or may not solve collective action problems and distribute the gains from these solutions in a
manner that improves the lots of all actors subject to them. As Knight argues, generally this will
depend “on whether the institutional form that distributionally favors the actors capable of asserting
their strategic advantage is socially efficient.”26 Except in some theoretically interesting limit cases,
then, institutions will produce unequal distributive outcomes, systematically advantaging some
groups and disadvantaging others, who would be better off under some alternative set of
institutions. In this sense, Mahoney notes, institutions create collective actors: “A shared position as
privileged (or not) within institutional complexes provides a basis for subjective identification and
coordinated collective action.”27 Here, I shall refer to collective actors comprised of individuals who
share a position within an institutional context and who, as a result, share distributional advantages
or disadvantages, as classes.
Though I employ a term that is most famously associated with Marxian social theory, I do not
take on board many of the assumptions that distinguish Marxian concepts of class. In particular, I
do not assume that the particular set of institutions governing the ownership and exchange of land,
machines, and labor necessary for economic production is fundamental within any given society at a
given time, whether because they directly produce the most important distributional inequalities, or
because they define classes most likely to become conscious of their common position, or because
they determine the forms that all other institutions in that context will take. It is certainly true that in
many places throughout much of history, the various institutions that comprise an overall
institutional context have reinforced one another, awarding political power, economic prosperity,
and social prominence to the same class or to a closely overlapping set of classes, while facilitating
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Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict, 40.
Mahoney, Colonialism and Post-Colonial Development, 17.
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the simultaneous political exclusion, economic exploitation, and social marginalization of other
classes. However, this pattern of reinforcing institutions is not inevitable, and indeed, as I illustrate
in the example I explore below, institutional contexts may depart from this pattern in ways that are
important for understanding the background problems that they produce for the political thinkers
that occupy them. Individuals and groups of individuals can be simultaneously advantaged by some
institutions and disadvantaged by others within the institutional context that they occupy. As a
result, they can belong to different classes at the same time.28
From these assumptions about institutional context, it follows that any given society will
contain classes that have different interests. Classes that derive advantages from existing institutions
will have interests in maintaining those institutions. Classes that are disadvantaged by existing
institutions will have contrary interests in reforming or abolishing those institutions and replacing
them with others. The presence of classes with contrary interests leads to conflicts, which may
remain latent or become salient at any given time. When conflict over a particular institution or set
of institutions becomes salient, spokespersons emerge to offer arguments as to why existing
institutional arrangements should be maintained, reformed, or abolished and replaced by others that
would distribute advantages and disadvantages differently. These spokespeople are political thinkers;
their arguments are political thoughts.
In his study of how economic ideas arise out of and influence the outcomes of economic crises,
Mark Blyth nicely describes the many roles that ideas play in conflicts over institutions. Ideas serve
to reduce uncertainty about the causes of crises, providing actors with an account of the world that
either legitimates existing institutions or undermines the contrary ideas that legitimated them before
The notion that individuals can belong to more than one class at the same time is inspired by the sociologist Erik Olin
Wright’s concept of “contradictory class locations” See: Classes (London: Verso), 19-63. Wright, it should be noted, does
not endorse, but in fact actively rejects, attempts like mine to move from a theory of classes defined by their position in
relation to the means of production to one in which classes are defined by the advantages and disadvantages they derive
from institutions, more broadly conceived. See: Erik Olin Wright, “The Shadow of Exploitation in Weber's Class
Analysis”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 67, No. 6 (Dec., 2002), 832-853.
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they proved prone to crisis. In this sense, “ideas are weapons”, as essential to the victory of both
insurgent and established classes as the other, physical and economic weapons combatants wield on
behalf of their classes’ institutional preferences.29 As Blyth notes, and as Rogers Smith has argued at
length, ideas also provide a basis for organizing coalitions to support either maintaining existing
institutions or reforming or abolishing them and replacing them with alternatives.30 Here, the fact
that individuals and groups may belong to multiple classes at once is critical, because it means that
any given institutional context can give rise to different coalitions, leaving the outcome of conflicts
indeterminate. Political thinkers may deploy ideas in an attempt to build consciousness and
coordinate collective action amongst members of a class that is directly advantaged or disadvantaged
by the particular institution or set of institutions that they hope to maintain or to reform, but they
may also attempt to attract support from members of other classes with more ambiguous or even
opposed interests in the existing institutional order.
In service of these distinctive coalitional aims, political thinkers will deploy distinctive
arguments. Arguments intended to organize and mobilize the members of a particular class will
emphasize the selective advantages that members of that class will derive from the maintenance,
reform, or abolition and replacement of a given institution. Political theorists are generally less
interested in this kind of argument than they are in those that insist upon the more widespread or
even universal benefits that are derived from existing institutions (sometimes simply because they are
existing) or that would be derived from some alternative institutional arrangement. Marxian
historians of political thought since Marx himself have identified this last, universalizing tendency as
Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 39.
30 Rogers M. Smith, “Ideas and the Spiral of Politics: The Place of American Political Thought in American Political
Development”, American Political Thought, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2014), 131-2. See also Smith, “Which Comes First, the
Ideas or the Institutions?”, in Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin, Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art
of the State (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 91-113.
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a central feature of “ideologies”, both status-quoist and revolutionary. In The German Ideology, Marx
observed that
Each new class which [would] put itself in the place of [the] one ruling before it is
compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common
interest of all the members of society. That is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas
the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The
class making a revolution [presents itself] from the very start, … not as a class but as the
representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting
the one ruling class.
As I noted above, for all their differences, comparative political theorists share, with Marx, a
decidedly skeptical outlook on the “the spurious ‘universality’ traditionally claimed by the [political
thinkers of] Western canon.”31 Modified according to the terms above, the Marxian approach to the
history of political thought offers a clear method for debunking both Western and non-Western
political thinkers’ universalist pretensions, by revealing the partial interests that were or would be
served by the institutions that their arguments defended or proposed.32
Intellectual Contexts
Some scholars interested in the connection between ideas and institutions have criticized Marx,
though, along with later “materialist” theorists of social behavior, for providing an overly simplistic
Fred Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June,
2004), 252-3.
32 For more recent efforts to study the history of political thought under similar assumptions, see: Richard Ashcraft, “On
the Problem of Method and the Nature of Political Theory”, Political Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (February, 1975), 5-25;
“Political Theory and the Problem of Ideology” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 42, No. 3 (August, 1980), 687-705; “Marx and
Political Theory” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 1984), 637-671; Neal Wood, “The
Social History of Political Theory” Political Theory, vol. 6, no. 3 (Aug., 1978), 345-367; Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal
Wood, “Socrates and Democracy: A Reply to Gregory Vlastos” Political Theory, vol. 14, no. 1 (Feb., 1986), 55-82; and
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London:
Verso, 2008), 1-16.
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account of how institutional contexts shape the interests of the individuals and groups that occupy
them. They argue that the attitudes that individuals or groups form regarding the institutions that
structure their interactions with other individuals and groups are not straightforward reflections of
the advantages and disadvantages that they derive from those institutions. These attitudes, and the
actions that they inspire, are more proximately determined by individuals’ perceptions of the
advantages and disadvantages that they derive from existing institutions, by the opinions that
individuals hold regarding the principles of justice in the distribution of power, prosperity, and
prominence, and by the beliefs that individuals develop about what alternative institutional
arrangements are possible and how they would affect the world. Ideas, in other words, do not simply
reflect the interests of classes privileged or underprivileged by institutions, they also mediate the
translation of institutions into interests, independently influencing the formation of classes and the
transition of conflicts from latency to salience.33
To incorporate these important insights, I argue that the background problems that cause
political thinkers to think and write or speak as they do are produced by an interaction between the
thinker’s institutional context and his or her intellectual context. Because, as I assumed above,
institutions result from social conflict, and because, as I argued above, social conflict is accompanied
by political thinking, all political thinkers always occupy not only an institutional context, but also an
intellectual one. Intellectual contexts are comprised by the remnants of arguments that previous
political thinkers offered on behalf of their own preferred institutional arrangements as they
intervened in the conflicts salient in their own societies. Some political thoughts remain behind long
Mark M. Blyth, “Any More Bright Ideas?: The Ideational Turn of Comparative Political Economy”, Comparative Politics,
vol. 29, no. 2 (January 1997), 229-250; Robert C. Lieberman, “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining
Political Change, American Political Science Review, vol. 96, no. 4 (December 2002), 697-712; Vivien A. Schmidt,
“Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse” Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 11
(2008), 303-326; Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox, eds., Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011); Martin B. Carstensen and Vivien A. Schmidt “Power Through, Over and In Ideas:
Conceptualizing Ideational Power in Discursive Institutionalism”, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 23, no. 3 (2016),
318-337.
33
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after their thinkers have succeeded or failed in having their institutional preferences realized—
indeed, long after their thinkers have passed from the scene—preserved in printed books and
pamphlets, in collections of complete works and in abridged and annotated student editions.
Notably, any given thinker’s intellectual context can be comprised in part by arguments that have
arisen during social conflicts in institutional contexts separated by space, as well as time, from his or
her own. Ideas about institutions travel much more readily—in both translated and untranslated
versions—than institutions themselves.
Intellectual contexts interact with institutional contexts in three related ways to produce the
background problems that cause political thinkers to think and write or speak in the ways that they
do. First, intellectual contexts mediate political thinkers’ very perception of their institutional
contexts, highlighting the distributional consequences of particular institutions or sets of institutions.
Institutions that have been the subject of particularly intense or particularly recent social conflicts,
whether within a political thinker’s own society or in some other, communicatively-linked society,
are more likely to become the subjects of salient social conflicts than those that have never formed a
focus of salient social conflicts in any near-by society. Second, intellectual contexts influence political
thinkers’ positive and normative analyses of their institutional context’s distributive consequences,
supplying ready-made reasons for finding particular institutions or sets of institutions just or unjust,
and thus for supporting efforts to maintain, reform, or abolish and replace them. The omnipresence
of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, for example, has made the economic institutions of capitalism
particularly frequent subjects of social conflict in the years since Marx himself lived and wrote—
more frequent, one might argue, than they would have been had Marx never lived or wrote, though
this is a hypothesis that could be tested by looking at intellectual contexts in which Marx is
unknown. Third, intellectual contexts provide a set of concepts and a language that political thinkers
can repurpose in order to construct and convey their own arguments in defense of existing
18
institutions or on behalf or proposed reforms. Political thinkers have proven to be well aware of the
fact that new arguments are easier to understand and often find a more receptive audience when
they are made employing familiar terms, so existing intellectual contexts play a strong role in
determining the rhetorical choices political thinkers make in the course of expressing their ideas.
Political theorists and intellectual historians interested in the history of political thought have
developed very good interpretive tools and analytical categories for studying intellectual contexts.
The Cambridge School historians Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock often refer to “languages”, or
“discourses”, or “broader traditions and frameworks of thought”,34 which supply the set of terms
and concepts that individual political thinkers employ when they intervene in the political debates
particular to the time and place in which they lived. They have demonstrated that different political
thinkers, or even different texts by the same thinker, can be best understood when they have been
properly classified by reference to the languages or discourses they employed. Pocock shows that
Machiavelli’s writings, for example, are best understood when we recognize that they employed
terms and concepts characteristic of “republican” or “neo-roman” languages or discourses, and thus
form part of a “Atlantic Republican Tradition” that connects Machiavelli to Aristotle and to the
Founders of the United States of America.35 Mark Bevir offers a related, but distinct definition of
“traditions” as “webs of beliefs” passed from teacher to pupil and subsequently modified by pupils
before being passed on again. Bevir argues that an individual political thinker, or an aspect of his or
her thought, can be partially explained by “locating” it in the tradition that provided the “starting
point” from which he or she departed.36 Finally, Michael Freeden brings us back to a term used
above, outlining an approach to analyzing the “distinctive configurations of political concepts” that
Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 101. See also Skinner, Visions of Politics, 103-27; and Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and
History, 1-34.
35 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment.
36 Bevir, Logic of the History of Ideas, 174-220.
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constitute political “ideologies”, such as “liberalism”, “conservatism”, and “socialism”.37 Though
each of these approaches makes different assumptions about exactly how, and how much, existing
“discourses”, “traditions”, or “ideologies” influence the thinking, writing and speaking of individual
political thinkers, all offer useful tools and categories for analyzing the intellectual context within
which a given political thinker thought and wrote or spoke, and which, in interaction with that
political thinker’s institutional context, produced the background problems that caused him or her to
think and write or speak as he or she did.
A Comparative Approach to Political Ideas
Different thinkers may be more or less explicit about the background problem or problems that
caused them to think about politics in the way that they did. Indeed, they may even be more or less
conscious of those problems, depending on how deeply they interrogate their own class position,
interests, presuppositions, prejudices, and inherited vocabulary and concepts. Thus, very often,
reconstructing the institutional and intellectual contexts that together produced the problem to
which a given text responds takes the analyst between the lines or off the page, leading to possible
disagreement with other analysts that cannot be resolved simply by appealing to the text itself.
Comparison provides a means of resolving such disputes, or at least a means of systematically
arguing for one or another position. The key issue is that the connection between the background
problem to which a text responds and the ideas contained within the text cannot be simply read out
of the text or otherwise directly observed. In this way, the reconstruction of background problems
for political ideas becomes a species of causal inference. Logically, in asserting that one phenomenon
caused another, we engage in an implicit counterfactual analysis; to say, for example, that the
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Notably,
Freeden has also proposed an approach to “comparative political thought” focused on the analysis of “combinations of
conceptual arrangements”; see: Freeden and Vincent, Comparative Political Thought, 12-22.
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advantages George W. Bush enjoyed as an incumbent candidate led to his reelection as President in
2004, is to say that were Bush not the incumbent in 2004, he would not have defeated John Kerry.
The difficulty—known as the “Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference”—is that we cannot
directly observe and thereby evaluate this particular counterfactual. By definition, it never happened.
Thus, it is impossible to directly confirm the causal relationship between Bush’s incumbency and his
electoral victory. Instead, the validity of this account must be inferred, and it is here that comparison
becomes a powerful tool. By examining other presidential elections, including ones that did not
involve incumbent candidates, we approximate an observation of the counterfactual. If we also
examine additional presidential elections that did involve an incumbent candidate, but where other
contextual factors to which alternative theories would attribute Bush’s victory – an ongoing war, an
improving economy – differed from 2004, we can increase our confidence in our inference.38
For the reconstruction of background problems to political ideas, the process is similar: we wish
to argue that a given text responds to a given background problem, or equally, that had the author in
question not encountered this background problem but another one, he or she would have had and
expressed different ideas or no ideas at all. However, because of the Fundamental Problem of
Causal Inference, we cannot directly observe the author’s encounter with a different background
problem. Thus, we compare our author to others, who did encounter different background
problems, and see how their ideas varied. If the result is a systematic pattern of relationships,
wherein similar background problems are associated with similar political ideas, and dissimilar
background problems with dissimilar ideas, we will have a compelling case to make for our
explanation.
As I’ve intimated, a key issue in using comparisons for causal inference or reconstructing
background problems is properly selecting cases or authors to compare. The idea is to isolate the
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 75-9.
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21
factors we want to suggest are important aspects of the background problem by controlling for
other aspects that alternative explanations suggest are more important. How is this done? John
Stuart Mill described what remains the basic logic of the comparative method in 1843:
The simplest and most obvious modes of singling out from among the circumstances which
precede or follow a phenomenon, those with which it is really connected by an invariable
law, are two in number. One is, by comparing together different instances in which the
phenomenon occurs. The other is, by comparing instances in which the phenomenon does
occur, with instances in other respects similar in which it does not. These two methods may
be respectively denominated, the Method of Agreement, and the Method of Difference.39
The Method of Agreement depends upon selecting cases for comparison that are as different as
possible in all possibly important respects, except in the sense that they share both the outcome that
is to be explained, and the factors that we wish to suggest can explain the outcome. As Mill noted,
“If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the
circumstance in which alone all the instances agree, is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.”40 The Method
of Difference, by contrast, depends upon selecting cases for comparison that are as similar as
possible in all possibly important respects, except in the sense that the outcome we wish to explain
appears in some cases and not in others, along with the factor that we wish to suggest explains the
outcome. Mill, again: “If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which
it does not occur, have every circumstance in common save one, that one occurring only in the former; the circumstance in
which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the cause, of the
phenomenon.”41 Taken alone, the Method of Difference is more powerful than the Method of
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Raciocinative and Inductive from J.M. Robson, ed., The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), VII, 388.
40 Ibid., 390.
41 Ibid., 391.
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Agreement, since it is less likely to produce inferences biased by the omission of variables,42 but the
best strategy is to combine both methods and take advantage of the unique leverage each offers.43
Additional elaborations are possible that reduce the number and implausibility of the assumptions
required to apply Mill’s methods to social scientific questions.44
Above, I argued that political ideas are caused by the background problems their authors
encountered, and that these background problems are, in turn, products of an interaction between
the institutional and intellectual contexts that political thinkers inhabit. This account of the
relationship between ideas and contexts can be paired with either the Method of Agreement or the
Method of Difference to defend proposed explanations of different political thinkers’ ideas (see
Table 1). If we hope to show, for example, that a political thinker’s ideas reflect the institutional
context that he or she inhabited—that his or her arguments defended existing or proposed
institutional arrangements that would benefit a particular class—we could either compare that
thinker to other thinkers who had similar ideas, and occupied a similar institutional context, but a
different intellectual context (the Method of Agreement) or compare that thinker to other thinkers
who had different ideas, and occupied a different institutional context, but a similar intellectual
context (the Method of Difference). Either comparison would support the proposed explanation of
the thinker’s ideas by reference to their institutional position. Alternatively, if we hope to show that
a political thinker’s ideas reflect the influence of an intellectual tradition, we could either compare
that thinker to other thinkers with similar ideas, and who occupied a similar intellectual context, but
a different institutional context (the Method of Agreement), or compare that thinker to other
See: Barbara Geddes, “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative
Politics” Political Analysis, Volume 2, No. 1 (1990), 131-150.
43 Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry” Comparative Studies in
Society and History, Vol. 22, No. 2, (April 1980), 183.
44 For an analysis of these assumptions, see: Stanley Lieberson, “Small N's and Big Conclusions: An Examination of the
Reasoning in Comparative Studies Based on a Small Number of Cases” Social Forces Vol. 70, No. 2 (December, 1991),
307-320. For elaborations, see: Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; and Fuzzy Set Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
42
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thinkers who had different ideas, and who occupied different intellectual contexts, but similar
institutional contexts (the Method of Difference). Again, if ideas vary systematically in relation to
intellectual contexts, we will have made a strong case that the influence of intellectual tradition was
determinative in shaping our thinker’s ideas.
Method of Agreement
Ideas
Institutional Context
Intellectual Context
Explanation
Similar
Similar
Different
Institutional Position
Similar
Different
Similar
Intellectual Influences
Ideas
Institutional Context
Intellectual Context
Explanation
Different
Similar
Different
Intellectual Influences
Different
Different
Similar
Institutional Position
Ideas
Institutional Context
Intellectual Context
Explanation
Similar
Different
Different
Great Minds Think Alike
Different
Similar
Similar
Idiosyncratic Genius
Method of Difference
Outliers
We can also conceive of two outlier explanations, which both go beyond the framework for
explaining political ideas set out above, but which have often been proposed as accounts of
particular political thinkers’ ideas, and which could be defended using the comparative method. If
we wished to show that a given political thinker thought what he or she did, not as a reaction to the
distributional inequalities occasioned by his or her institutional context, and not because of the
determinative influence of his or her intellectual context, but because the ideas are in and of
themselves attractive, we could compare him or her to other political thinkers who had similar ideas
but who occupied different institutional contexts and different intellectual contexts. If we can
24
demonstrate that equivalences appear even in the absence of these explanatory factors, we would
make a strong case that they are the result of ‘great minds thinking alike’. It is possible that this is
indeed the case for the Islamic and Western critics of modernity that Roxanne Euben compares in
her seminal work, which I discussed above. Alternatively, if we wished to show that a given political
thinker’s ideas reflect some idiosyncratic feature of his or her biography or psychological formation,
we could compare him or her to other thinkers that had different ideas, despite being situated in
similar institutional and intellectual contexts. Conceding the possibility that a political thinker might
think in a way that cannot be explained by reference to either his or her institutional or intellectual
contexts does not, I don’t think, imply that correctly characterizing the interaction of these contexts
will go a long way toward explaining the thinking of most political thinkers, which is why I present it
here as an exceptional case.
Exceptional Liberalism and Peculiar Racism in Comparative Perspective
The political thought of the founders of the United States has long been the subject of
intense scholarly dispute, with debates regarding what configuration of economic interests, if any, lay
behind the period’s ideological cleavages giving way to debates regarding whether and to what extent
the original impulse and results of the Revolution were “radical” or rather “conservative”, which
themselves gave way to debates regarding the relative importance of “liberal” or “republican” ideas
and influences, and so on. These debates have been extraordinarily enlightening, and at times even
produced something like a scholarly consensus, but they all tended as they developed to become
both repetitious and arcane, as their protagonists rehashed familiar materials or searched out
increasingly recondite sources to support their positions.
One feature of the founders’ political thought that has always attracted particular attention is
the paradoxical combination of commitments to liberal, democratic, or republican political ideals, on
25
the one hand, and to racially exclusive political institutions, especially slavery, on the other. In a
famous 1775 pamphlet critical of the American Revolution, the English intellectual and polemicist
Samuel Johnson pointedly asked, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the
drivers of the negroes?” Historians of American political thought have posed variations on this
question ever since. Some, like Johnson, have argued that the Founders’ revolutionary rhetoric is
exposed as rank hypocrisy by their sordid entanglements with slavery. On their account, America
was never really liberal, or democratic, or republican, but only racist and imperialist. Others have
taken a diametrically opposed view, insisting that the racial, religious, and gender discrimination
ubiquitous at the American founding were always inconsistent with the Founders’ true ideals, and
thus destined, by a sort of dialectical necessity, for abolition. America was never really racist, this
interpretation insists; its many discriminatory policies were vestigial, and their eventual undoing was
inevitable.
A more interesting debate has taken place in recent years between the proponents of two
more mixed positions. Rogers Smith, for instance, has argued for what he calls the “multiple
traditions thesis”, according to which liberalism, republicanism, and racism are threads, woven in
different proportions at different times, into the fabric of American politics, their relative weight
varying with the efforts of politicians to secure sufficient coalitions for reelection. They bear no
necessary relationship to one another, either logically or historically, but they are all consistent, and
not aberrational, aspects of American political thought. By contrast, Jennifer Hochschild insists that
“liberal democracy and racism in the United States are historically, even inherently, reinforcing.”
Here, it was precisely America’s “peculiar institution” that distinguished America from Europe, and
made its exceptional egalitarianism possible. Similar arguments have been made, since Frederick
Jackson Turner, if not since Thomas Jefferson, about the violent expropriation of Native Americans
on the frontier, which made it possible for all white Americans to aspire to, if not actually achieve,
26
landownership and “independency”, considered a basic requisite of republican freedom, which was
enjoyed only by a small minority in Europe.
In my book, From Independence to Empire in American and Latin American Political Thought, I
propose an explanation of the paradoxes of American political thought that incorporates elements
of both Smith’s and Hochschild’s views. As Europeans within American colonies, the men who
would lead the American independence movement enjoyed a privileged social status, benefiting
from the forced labor and institutional exclusion of Indigenous- and African-Americans. However,
as Americans within European empires, they were marginalized by their European-born peers,
granted unequal political representation, and subjected to policies designed to advance metropolitan
interests at the colonies’ expense. Independence offered an escape from imperial domination, but
posed a serious threat to the internal hierarchy of the colonies. Thus, I suggest, the social position of
the American colonists imposed a distinctive background problem on their revolutionary political
thinkers: how to end European rule of the Americas without undermining colonists’ rule in the
Americas.
The founders’ attempts to address this problem are apparent everywhere in the political
thought of the American Revolution. To justify their break with Europe, American patriots
developed famous codes of natural rights which proclaimed the equality of all men, but persisted,
after independence had been won, in systematically denying rights, and applying unequal treatment
to women and to Indigenous, African, and mixed-race peoples. They designed a constitution they
presented as an embodiment of popular sovereignty, but included measures defended as means of
insulating policy from popular influence. And even after completing a struggle for freedom against
an empire, they sought to expand their new state’s frontiers and consolidate control over new
populations, eventually forging a new empire even larger than its predecessor. I argue that these
points of contradiction in the Revolution’s political thought were caused by the tensions in the social
27
position of the revolutionaries, in the sense of responding in like manner to a common background
problem.
In order to make this case systematically, I employed a comparative approach. The American
Revolution was not the only independence movement led by a colonial elite. During the first twentyfive years of the nineteenth century, all of mainland Spanish America criticized, fought, and finally
overthrew the empire that had governed the region for more than three hundred years. In Spanish,
the term criollo or Creole describes precisely the social position occupied by the leaders of these
revolutions, and nicely captures the founders of the United States as well, denoting a person of
European descent born in the Americas. Following Mill’s Method of Agreement, I chose to
compare prominent Creole ideologues of the American independence movements, who beside their
shared social position, were as different as possible. Ultimately, I conducted three case studies,
comparing the political thought of Alexander Hamilton of the United States (1755-1804), Simón
Bolívar of Venezuela (1783-1830), and Lucas Alamán of Mexico (1792-1853).
Though all descendants of European colonists born in the Americas, Hamilton, Bolívar, and
Alamán came from very different colonies. The institutional and religious differences between
British and Spanish rule divided the United States from Venezuela and Mexico, which were
themselves quite distinctive, occupying opposite poles of the range of forms of Spanish American
imperialism. Venezuela was in many senses a classic colonial ‘periphery’, with an economy
dominated by export of agricultural primary goods and a relatively small, mostly rural population, of
which a majority was African-American or mixed-race, reflecting the predominance of chattel
slavery on its cacao, coffee, and indigo plantations. The colony enjoyed a metropolitan policy of
benign neglect for much of its history, permitting Creole elites extensive autonomy in the oversight
of local affairs, and the development of dense illicit networks of trade with European powers other
than Spain. Meanwhile, Mexico – known as New Spain before independence – was the crown jewel
28
of Spain’s American possessions, home to roughly half of the empire’s overseas population, densely
urbanized, and much more diverse economically than colonial Venezuela. While some slaves were
brought to New Spain, indigenous communities and mestizos made up most of the non-European
population. Spanish sovereignty was also much more present in New Spain, where for centuries
newly-arrived Spanish immigrants married into established Creole families, creating a local ruling
class with a distinctly trans-Atlantic, but exclusively Hispanic, character.
Deeply shaped by the differences between their societies, Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán
were also biographically dissimilar: Hamilton was the illegitimate offspring of a fallen Scottish
nobleman and a French Huguenot who met in the Caribbean. He married into the colonial upper
class of British North America, and rose quickly up the ranks of first the military and later the
political hierarchies of his adoptive country by virtue of his extraordinary energy, administrative
genius, and formidable rhetorical talents. Bolívar, meanwhile, was born into Caracas’s Creole elite,
inherited a huge fortune and a large estate, and assumed a leadership position in the movement for
Spanish American independence virtually from the start, displaying throughout adept military
strategy, powerful personal charisma, and a singularly expansive vision of his revolution’s potential
world-historical import. Alamán, finally, was the scion of a long-established New Spanish family
whose financial fortunes had declined somewhat by the time of his birth. Of the three, only he had
an extensive formal education, which made him an indispensable statesman and technocrat during
Mexico’s early independence and then later his country’s premier historian.
Perhaps most importantly, Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán differed in yet a third dimension:
the intellectual contexts that they inhabited. Hamilton’s political thought evidences deep debts to the
authors of the Scottish Enlightenment, from whom he derived his focus on the interaction of
individual interests and a clear sense of the rising importance of commerce in international politics.
Bolívar, meanwhile, adapted the re-nascent classical republicanism of the French philosophes for his
29
own purposes, leaving behind an oeuvre marked by concerns with the cultivation of ‘virtue’ as a
means of securing ‘liberty’ from ‘corruption’. Finally, Alamán lived long enough to absorb the
conservative reaction to the French Revolution, especially the writings of Edmund Burke. He was
keenly aware of the advantages that preserving elements of New Spanish tradition might hold for an
independent Mexico.
As it turned out, these divergent influences deeply colored each author’s intellectual
contributions to his respective country’s independence and early statehood. I was not able to claim
that Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán were ideologically identical. But I did show that despite their
differences – societal, biographical, and philosophical – Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán’s converged
on a common set of commitments, defending American independence as a response to the unequal
conditions imposed on Creoles by European imperial rule, proposing constitutions designed to
consolidate Creole rule within independent societies through political centralization and a system of
separated powers, and seeking to expand and consolidate their states’ sovereign authority through
territorial conquest and internal colonization.
The nature of the comparison I conducted allowed me to rule out several possible
explanations of these points of convergence. Neither economic interests, biographical idiosyncrasies,
nor philosophical influence could account for the similarity of their views, because they differed
profoundly in each of these respects. Rather, I inferred, Hamilton, Bolívar, and Alamán produced
similar ideas because their shared social position presented similar background problems for their
political thought: each, as American Creoles, sought to reconcile a defense of revolution and
independence with an attempt to preserve the imperial social hierarchy in which they occupied a
relatively exalted position.
In order to strengthen this case, I conduct a series of more superficial comparisons selected
according to the Method of Difference, with the major ideologues of the Glorious Revolution, the
30
French Revolution, and twentieth-century anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa. These
comparisons provide an additional check, allowing me to show that figures situated similarly in
terms of economic, biographical, and philosophical contexts nonetheless departed from Hamilton,
Bolívar, and Alamán in the central commitments they shared as Creoles. Along the way, the
generalized concept of the Creole Revolution I used to frame each case study permitted new insight
into the political thought of these important individuals, and interventions in the large literatures
dedicated to each. This feedback between theory and evidence, between an overarching
interpretation and its application to specific cases, was ultimately the most productive feature of the
comparative method I adopted.
Conclusion
In concluding, I would like to return to the concern raised in Sheldon Wolin’s critique of
“methodism” in political science, which I mentioned at this essay’s outset. Wolin’s primary objection
to his own contemporaries’ increasing preoccupation with methodology was that the effort to
develop ever-more-refined techniques for the identification and measurement of empirical
regularities under existing political institutions would blunt political scientists’ interest in criticizing
those institutions, and deprive them of the ability to conceive of alternatives. Methodism is depoliticizing, uncritical, almost by design, as Wolin illustrated by means of a discussion of Descartes’
early, and influential, Discourse on Method.45
Interestingly, it is clear that a similar concern is present in comparative political theorists’
rejection of comparative political science as a methodological inspiration. For Fred Dallmayr, the
problem lies in comparative political scientists’ attempts to “assume the stance of a global overseer
or universal spectator whose task consists basically in assessing the relative proximity or
45
Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation”, 1065-69.
31
nonproximity of given societies to the established global yardstick.” The comparative political
theorist, he insists, should “shun spectatorial allures and assume the more modest stance of coparticipant in the search for truth.”46 It is helpful, here, to distinguish the different sorts of “truth”
that a comparative political theory might seek. Andrew March has helpfully noted that the subfield
of political theory, in general, encompasses both “scholarly” and “engaged” intellectual activities,
concerned, respectively, with “whether we understand well enough a given text, practice, or
phenomenon” and with “whether some set of ideas are the right ideas for us.”47 Dallmayr rejects
comparative political science as a model for comparative political theory because he believes that by
seeking to explain geographic and historical variations in political ideas, comparative political
theorists will solidify, rather than undermine the West’s political, economic, and intellectual
hegemony. That is to say, in March’s terms: a comparative political theory modeled on comparative
political science’s “scholarly” activities would compromise its “engaged” ones.
I think this concern is mistaken. Indeed, I think that the comparative approach to the
explanation of political ideas I have described above would not only allow comparative political
theorists to continue pursuing the engaged project that they have heretofore pursued, but also to
broaden the kinds of criticisms of existing institutions that comparative political theory could make.
Just as comparative political theorists have adopted their methodologies from existing
schools of thought concerning the history of political thought, they have conceived of the engaged
purposes to which these studies could be of these studies along the same lines as the progenitors of
these schools. Quentin Skinner, in his polemic against turning to the history of political thought as a
source of insights into the “perennial” questions of political philosophy, famously argued that we
moderns “must learn to do our thinking for ourselves.” But he allowed that intellectual history
served an important purpose in the contemporary world: “the classic texts, especially in social,
46
47
Fred Dallmayr, “Toward a Comparative Political Theory”, The Review of Politics, vol. 59, no. 3 (Summer, 1997), 421-2.
Andrew F. March, “What is Comparative Political Theory?”, The Review of Politics, vol. 71 (2009), 534-5, italics original.
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ethical, and political thought, help to reveal—if we let them—not the essential sameness, but rather
the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitment,” demonstrating, in this
sense “the extent to which those features of our own arrangements which we may be disposed to
accept as traditional or even ‘timeless’ truths may in fact be the merest contingencies of our peculiar
history and social structure.”48
Similarly, comparative political theorists argue that engagement with East and South Asian,
Islamic, and African political thought will reveal the contingency and provincialism of putatively
universal principles that are often taken for granted within the European and North American
traditions. Thus, for the most part, the critical edge of Comparative Political Theory is located in the
prospect that the terms in which non-Western political thinkers think “may eventually come to
displace existing criteria for understanding and evaluating what it is we think we are doing” as
political theorists.49 The study of non-Western ideas promises a “fundamental reframing of
questions, and a reconstitution of premises about knowledge production and organization.”50 To
accomplish these radical ends, a comparative political theory with critical, or “engaged” intent must,
then, be primarily dedicated to the study of “distinct, autonomous modes of reasoning” which are in
some sense “seal[ed] … off from us, so that [they] will remain alien to us no matter how long we
engage with [them].”51 In other words, comparative political theory accomplishes its engaged
purposes by examining texts that, in the framework developed above, are different because of the
different intellectual contexts in which they were produced.
As should be clear, the comparative approach to the explanation of political ideas described
here can perform this same critical function, providing a rigorous means of demonstrating how
Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” History and Theory, vol. 8, no. 1 (1969), 52-3.
Leigh K. Jenco, “Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory: The Curious Thesis of ‘Chinese Origins for
Western Knowledge,’ 1860-1895” Political Theory vol. 42, no 6 (2014), 660.
50 Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99.
51 March, “What is Comparative Political Theory?”, 552.
48
49
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variations in intellectual contexts cause variations in political ideas, and revealing, in the process, that
ideas which we might be inclined to regard as universally valid are in fact only contingently so. The
comparative approach can even expand the range of thinkers whose ideas can be subjected to this
form of critique, by demonstrating that not only intellectual, but also institutional contexts introduce
elements of contingency into the political ideas they produce. But, importantly, the comparative
approach can perform these critical function without succumbing to the relativism that may be seen
to follow from Skinner’s contextual approach to the history of ideas. The comparative approach,
while concurring with Skinner and others’ insistence that all ideas are contingent upon the contexts
which they appeared, provides grounds for preferring some contexts to others as sources of critical
insights relevant to the contemporary world.
In the passage from The German Ideology cited above, Marx observed that “each new class
which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through
its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society.” Here, Marx
shares, as I argued, comparative political theorists’ critical outlook on universalist political ideas,
insisting that putative universalism masked partial class interests. However, Marx continued, arguing
that some classes actually have a better claim on universalism than others. Indeed, he suggested that
“every new class… achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling
previously.” That is to say, in the course of a social revolution, the spokesmen of the insurgent class
or classes take on a double task, not only advocating preferred institutional arrangements, but
exposing the errors and contradictions in the arguments offered by status-quoist political thinkers on
behalf of existing institutions. Revolutionary ideologies, then, though still perhaps marred by their
own contradictions, come closer to a true depiction of reality than the status-quoist ideologies they
seek to supplant. For Marx, there is progress toward truth in the history of ideas.
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The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács developed this insight in his essay on “Reification and
the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” arguing that capitalist relations of production endowed
industrial laborers with a privileged “standpoint,” which permitted political thinkers engaged in the
labor movement to produce an “objective understanding of the nature of society,” free from the
mystifying ideologies of the bourgeois ruling class.52 The social theorist W.E.B. DuBois also makes a
similar argument in The Souls of Black Folk, suggesting that African-Americans were “gifted with
second-sight in this American world,” a “double-consciousness” that simultaneously hindered
political activity and disclosed alternative institutional possibilities that white Americans could not
imagine. The same insight runs through “standpoint feminism,” which built on Marxian foundations
an account of the epistemological privilege that women acquired in patriarchal societies. For Nancy
Hartsock, “women's lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male
supremacy.” The truth of feminists’ critical characterizations of the existing institutions that
perpetuate patriarchy derives precisely from the disadvantage that women suffer while living under
those institutions.53
What these accounts share is the insight that a given political thinker might be capable of
offering a critical perspective on existing institutions not only by embodying an alternative
intellectual tradition, but by virtue of his or her institutional context. A comparative approach to
political ideas, by rigorously demonstrating which ideas reflect this condition of disadvantage, could
guide us toward those thinkers particularly apt to provide such a perspective. It may also lead us to
Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in
Marxist Dialectics Trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1971), 149.
53 Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical
Materialism”, in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintinkka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology,
Metaphysics, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 284. See also: Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power:
Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (New York: Longman, 1983); and, for a very useful recent review of the literature
on feminist standpoint theory, Susan Hekman “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited” Signs, vol. 22,
no. 2 (Winter, 1997), 341-365.
52
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question the current attractiveness of political thinkers to whom we presently grant a nearly sacred
status, like the ideologists of Creole Revolution I described above. If I am correct in asserting that
their basic dilemma was to reconcile the invocations of individual liberty and political equality that
formed the premises of their argument for independence with their interest in maintaining a racial
and social hierarchy forged under imperial rule, then, to the degree that we no longer consider the
latter aim defensible, we will have to qualify our reliance on their ideas.
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