Sam Phoenix Clarke, University of Cambridge
Economic & Political History Review, Volume I, Number II, October 2025
Editorial Summary
Sam Phoenix Clarke’s “Intellectual History as Political History” argues that political ideas must be understood as products of their historical and material contexts. Using the concept of liberty, Clarke shows how the meaning of “freedom” shifted from classical to modern liberalism, reflecting transformations in economics, society, and global politics. He contends that political ideas are not abstract theories but active forces shaped by and shaping political realities. Drawing on the Cambridge School tradition, Clarke presents intellectual history as the study of how political concepts evolve through conflict, persuasion, and reinterpretation, illuminating the dynamics of political justification and disagreement.
Introduction
I begin with a brief puzzle, formulated on a grand scale and then on a small scale. How can two vastly different political worlds—Lenin’s Soviet Union and the Roman Republic—both plausibly claim to be founded on the same political principle, that of “freedom”? Similarly, how can two politicians, in a contemporary debate, justify opposing policies—say, whether or not to impose rent controls—by appealing to the same ideal of “liberty”? Both societies claim as their founding principle ‘freedom’, both politicians claim to value ‘liberty’: why do these societies differ, and why do these politicians disagree?
The concept of ‘liberty’, as an organizing concept for political thought and action in history, holds unparalleled importance. Yet the ‘classical liberty’ of even the nineteenth century looks vastly different to the ‘modern liberty’ of the twentieth (let alone the significant detour that might be made into ‘ancient’ conceptions of liberty). Taking the term at face value as a political principle, two vastly different sets of emphases and political institutions stand implied. Both involve some form of commitment to some common principles – freedom, toleration, individualism, popular sovereignty – but their differences across time, space, and culture are stark.
The ‘classical’ liberty of the 17th-19th centuries, emerging from the thought of the Enlightenment, stood as an amalgamation of a handful of national philosophical cultures. The Britain of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, analysing traditional institutions and refining them towards putatively rational ends; the France of Emmanuel Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, criticising existing political forms as impediments to freedom; the Germany of Immanuel Kant’s What is Enlightenment?, sketching theories of history and human progress; the America of Thomas Jefferson, constructing models of political representation to supersede the monarchical regimes of Europe. ‘Liberty’, in these political worlds, stood for laissez-faire economics; free trade; private property; nationalism; passive toleration, limitations upon the state.
The liberalism of the mid-twentieth century came to look squarely different. The laissez-faire economic liberalism of the prior century gave way to mixed economies and state intervention to delimit and stabilise markets; the firmly national frame of classical liberalism was eroded by international bodies such as the League of Nations, the UN, and the Organisation of American States; nations took up the role of deliberate agents of societal justice, developing early welfare states; and, under the pressure of indigenous anticolonial movements, European empires were gradually pushed towards policies of decolonisation.
What is going on here that makes both of these social worlds genuine, coherent expressions of what is superficially the ‘same’ political principle – that of ‘liberty’? At play is the reinterpretation and rearticulation of ideas of freedom, precipitated by the shifts taking place in politics. Many political thinkers, spurred by the events and experiences of their times, came to judge the formulations of ‘liberty’ embedded in the politics of the older liberalism as insufficient on their own terms: being inadequately formulated to capture the breadth of conditions and experiences that constitute meaningful liberty, and being encoded in economic, political, and social institutions that fail to make good on the original promises of the classical conception of liberty. While advocates of liberty, old and new, converge on some similar principles, they diverge around the means to realise these, and how to balance older principles of laissez-faire economics, property rights, or limited government with both the more expansive demands of liberty and the changing circumstances of the world.
The claims to recognition of different interest-groups within the state, articulating themselves through mass politics – minority cultures, trade unions, movements for women’s suffrage, and the emerging professional middle-class – called upon the state to work as a mediator of conflict, playing an active role in the just distribution of material and spiritual goods. The World Wars led to a widespread sense of the destabilising force of nationalisms and imperialisms, and to renewed calls for international integration. The shift from smaller-scale to monopoly capitalism led many to see systems of private property as a threat to liberty, democracy, and welfare. An intensification of national consciousness across colonial empires led many to recognise the hypocrisy of liberal principles of popular self-rule, and work for a consistent application of these via decolonisation. Economic crisis, emerging from warfare and the Great Depression, precipitated the demand for the state as an interventionist force, working to regulate and stabilise economies. The rise of communist powers incentivised a strategy of containment through credible alternative, bolstering calls for the state to actively secure social welfare. By the middle of the twentieth century, liberalism seemed almost entirely a new creature to a century before. ‘Liberty’, as an organising concept for global politics, lent itself to a radically different set of norms, institutions, and ideologies.
What am I using this historical sketch to indicate? It is that political ideas do not float freely in a plane above the material world, developing distinct from the substance of ‘real’ politics, nor do they remain, even if initially formulated there, in the academy. It is to demonstrate that political ideas and the political world exist in a constant, dynamic, and mutually constitutive relationship – with the ideas held and articulated by politicians, parties, peoples, or classes transforming with their changing material conditions and their experiences of these, and these ideas shaping the positions held and choices made by political agents. One cannot be schematic about this: the modes in which the world works on ideas and ideas work on the world are always subject to a multitude of factors – the political organisation of a state, the power of interest-groups and actors within it, its cultural and educational institutions, and its available technologies of communication – but some form of this bilateral relationship is always present. The discipline of the history of political thought can be taken, in a broad sense, as the study of this relationship: the study of why political ideas can mean so many different things in practice; how these shifts in meaning emerge from shifts in practical politics; and how these ideas have worked back on the world, helping to restructure political life through argument, persuasion, the reshaping of common sense, and organised political action.
In this task, modern historians of political thought in the tradition of the ‘Cambridge School’ – a rough grouping of ‘contextualists’ such as Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, J.G.A. Pocock, and Peter Laslett – take our task as twofold. First, to understand political thought as a much greater and wider endeavour than political philosophy. Political thought, in this sense, is the sum total of the vocabularies through which societies articulate their agreements and disagreements on how the world is and ought to be – of which academic political philosophy is a distinct form, notable for its level of theoretical abstraction and its localisation within the academy. Secondly, to understand political thinkers as a much wider category of social agents than political philosophers. Very few of those in history who have made contributions to our political languages were philosophers by vocation, and ‘political thought’ as an activity is one which is and has been practiced across all social and professional strata: by politicians and philosophers; by scientists and historians; by teachers and soldiers; by activists and citizens. We would blind ourselves to both the richness and diversity of political ideas, and the messiness, so to speak, of the uses to which ideas have been put – to legitimise, to persuade, to mobilise – if we understood political thought only on the level of the most refined and abstract theoretical systems, devised in the minds of remote and professionalised political philosophers.
Political thought, today and in history, is similarly an activity conducted at numerous levels of abstraction – it is not just that people disagree on the answers to political questions, but also the formulation of questions, the relevance of questions, and whether the questions are even meaningful to be asking in the first place. Thinkers, accordingly, are attempting to do many different kinds of thing in thinking and writing: the typically political mode is the assertion that a given state of affairs is desirable, but this intention shares space with attempts to map what is factually the case; what is possible; what is feasible, given the concrete state of the world; what we might otherwise aspire to; where we might be going; and what, if anything, a given political subject might be able to do about that. Political thinkers may thus attempt to map such questions descriptively; they attempt to persuade others of the truth of their claims; they attempt to mobilise individuals or collectives into action; they attempt to warn or dissuade them into inaction. All of these, and their many intersections, are fertile objects of study.
Studying the history of political thought, in this sense, helps to make political conflict intelligible beyond the study of competing ‘-isms’. Taking political thought at a greater level of granularity, we study disagreement: within and between movements, ideologies, and political parties, and in breaking down sweeping conceptual abstractions like ‘liberty’, ‘equality’, or ‘progress’ into many smaller parts, formed and transformed through conflict and dialogue across all vocations and strata of society. Political disagreement, through this lens, is a much finer-grained phenomenon than ‘liberalism versus conservatism’, or ‘individualism versus collectivism’. The historian, when studying words spoken to political effect, asks: liberty for whom? In what is ‘liberty’ taken to consist, psychologically, and what political conditions are understood as allowing this? How does this formulation of liberty differ from another – and how are these differences shaped by the cultural background, or religion, or economic position, or personal experiences of, the speaker? What, in invoking ‘liberty’ in this context, for this audience, is the speaker attempting to accomplish in the world? Who are they trying to persuade, and how? Why have they judged their own formulation to be convincing in the minds of their audience? Who was convinced – and who wasn’t?
Liberty, here, is just one example; one can get as granular, as esoteric, or as technical as one likes. The concepts do not need to be as categorically normative, or archetypally political, as ‘liberty’ is. One might look, as I have in myrecent work, at contested conceptions of scientific purity in the mid-20th century: at the dispute between two factions of scientific intellectuals over the role of ‘scientific curiosity’ as an explanation of progress in the history of science, and the rivalling political purposes to which adherents of ‘freedom in science’ versus the ‘social relations of science’ set the histories they wrote. One can study the history of political thought at the level of rhetoric – as the history of attempts to skilfully persuade people, and thereby to do things in political life – without which, for example, one might take Marx or Weber as primarily theorists of politics, rather than as prospective agents in it. Viewed as rhetoric, struggles between different uses of the term ‘liberty’ look a lot like struggles to claim the legitimacy of the label: as with concepts like ‘science’ or ‘humanism’, there is significant persuasive power to be won in positioning one’s ideology as the true heir of a noble historical tradition!
To close off my discussion here, I want to suggest that one of the most compelling reasons for this form of study is the insight it gives into political argument. The study of political thought is the study, in part, of political justification: the study of what was the case in a certain social world that made certain political claims appear legitimate, convincing, or meaningful, or that made other claims appear illegitimate, unconvincing, or meaningless. When approaching the task of political thinking, one has a certain degree of freedom: one can innovate with the resources from one’s education, one’s experience, one’s religion, one’s inner conscience; but one is always constrained by those of those for whom we are writing. I do not get to choose what you consider reasonable, what youintuitively value, or which experiences you consider salient. I can craft my language, my examples, or my chains of reasoning to appeal to my perception of these, but they are, in a strong sense, given. If one writes for the public, one writes in the knowledge that, as from Marx’s Brumaire, ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’. The study of the history of thought in its relationship to politics –‘intellectual history as political history’ – can, I hope, help train a reflective awareness of this fact, and render it slightly more negotiable. If, as Raymond Geuss writes in his Politics and the Imagination, ‘ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future’ –we can perhaps be made better at ethical and political disagreement through the study of this crystallisation: more sensitive to the processes through which forms of political justification become persuasive or obsolete, more acute in establishing the finer details of dissensus, and more skilful articulators of our own political thinking.
Further reading:
Dunn, John M. – ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy 43 (1968), pp. 85-104.
Finlayson, Lorna – The political is political : conformity and the illusion of dissent in contemporary political philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd., London (2015).
Geuss, Raymond – Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA (2020).
Geuss, Raymond – Politics and the Imagination. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ (2010).
Pocock, J.G.A. – ‘The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry’, in P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds) Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2nd series (Oxford, 1962), pp. 183-202.
Skinner, Quentin – ‘Meaning and understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8 (1969), pp. 3-53.