Anti-Climacus

A NOTE ON POLITICAL THEORY: Like most who first stumble into political theory, Iong assumed all the research part of my job really required was the reading of texts. Now, I haven't become a textualist apostate, but I've noticed that one of the common operating assumptions we have is generally wrong: the universal availability of texts. We have, near to hand (or in libraries), say, all of Augustine's works, or the complete works of Kant in German and English, with all the relevant commentaries. This makes for better interpretation of texts generally--more knowledge is always better--but there are some exceptions.

To wit, last week one of my friends asked me about a line from Rousseau:

Hobbes prétend que l'homme est naturellement intrépide, et ne cherche qu'à attaquer, et combattre. Un philosophe illustre pense au contraire, et Cumberland et Pufendorff l'assurent aussi, que rien n'est si timide que l'homme dans l'état de nature, et qu'il est toujours tremblant, et prêt à fuir au moindre bruit qui le frappe, au moindre mouvement qu'il aperçoit.

Specifically, whether the 'philosophe illustre' was Grotius. My initial response was no, because sociability, not timidity, is the foundational social fact (I also quibbled that there's no state of nature as such in De jure belli ac pacis).

On further reflection, I suspect I was wrong* (sorry, James), for a reason I began to elaborate at the time: 18th century French interpretations of Grotius are heavily influenced by the translations and scholarly work of the Pufendorfian Jean Barbeyrac. So far as I can tell, every edition of Grotius in French up through the revolution was either Barbeyrac's, or a slight variant on it. He is sometimes considered (by me, for instance) to be a very biased interpreter of texts--he reads Pufendorf and Hobbes back into Grotius**. Thus it may be that Rousseau's understanding of Grotius' text has been altered in a way that makes the actual text fit awkwardly with this interpretation, and Rousseau's move will look odd to the modern reader who knows that interpretation isn't correct.

This comes up as an issue quite frequently in Grotius scholarship--he's never been read very cleanly because almost every time he gets taken up, it's by people who have an interest in making the text perform certain roles, regardless of what it says. My general thought is that there are two projects here: one (my dissertation) attempting to do a decent textual analysis, the other trying to understand how we end up with a model that tends to become Grotius-v-Vattel, to the impoverishment of numerous innovations in international legal theory. I try to keep them separate, but things like the Rousseau passage above remind me they're not always so far apart as my analytic distinctions would like them to be.


*mostly because I have no idea who elese Rousseau might be referring to.

**indeed, I suspect Rousseau's dismissal of Hobbes and Grotius as variations on the same thing (in the Social Contract) is largely due to the influence of Barbeyrac.