16 - Theory and historiography

Summary

Like traditions, intellectual contexts are tricky things lying at the heart of the historian's enterprise. Their specification is difficult because they are contingent upon the delineations structuring the world from which a given text is cast, a wet rag upon the present shore; upon the configurations within a given activity; and upon the rigidity of the delineations that keep one activity from flowing into another. It must sometimes seem that the lines are written only upon the water. So, what we may see now as a political text does not necessarily dredge up a clearly political intellectual context. Lawson's Politica is one such work, coming from a world in which, as John Pocock has stressed, the terms of politics were fluid, and the very notion of the political could be fugitive. It was certainly not conceptually secure, self-evident or autonomous. When at the end of the century Richard More catalogued his books according to intellectual domain he used no classification of the political for his absolutist treatises, his regicide tracts, his Plato and his Machiavelli.

Not surprisingly, then, the texts that swirl suggestively around the Politica are both more and less than political: names such as Donne, Marvell, Scaliger, Andrewes, Tertullian eddy around it like Aristotle, Marsilio, Althusius, Machiavelli and Hobbes and by turns some shift from being corroborative background to specifically focussed context.