Reforming the Law of Nature: The Secularisation of Political Thought, 1532–1682

Abstract

but a whole host of economic, social, military, technological and cultural factors which linked with that ideology. What was happening on the eastern front from 1941 mattered. The stress on the utility of the subject can dissolve into a generalised need to study history, one in which H.P.T. is vital but has no special status. Though he is confident in the subject’s utility, Whatmore also holds that H.P.T. is “facing a time of crisis” (30). This is part of a wider crisis of historical studies, marked by a turn towards “nationalist political narratives, manufactured political consensuses and social-media driven moral crusades” (30). Two attitudes towards the past are gaining strength in wider society: that the present is better than the past and therefore the past is of no interest to us, and that the past is to be judged by the moral standards of the present. More narrowly, H.P.T. is subject to criticism not only for its–real if declining–gender and geographical imbalances. The voluble accusation is that H.P.T. is Eurocentric in character and thus “necessarily racist, blinkered, imperialist, and colonialist”, both in terms of the ideas that are studied and the fact it has tended to exclude other viewpoints (114). “Hero and villain studies” are back in vogue, as recent productions by many of our North American colleagues demonstrate. Out of crisis, however, comes opportunity. Whatmore sets out a qualified defence but also a sense of how H.P.T. needs to develop. It is not the methods that need modifying – contextualist approaches are well suited to the study of non-canonical authors and ignored traditions. The expansion of the studies of gender, global histories or subaltern histories are all welcome developments, but are not ones antagonistic to established methods. Diversification of the subject would serve us better than its destruction during a “purity spiral”–our current moment has a faint whiff of 1793 (117). Such diversification is, Whatmore stresses, picking up pace too. Indeed, he is enthusiastic about the new themes and expanded geographical coverage of the subject and embodies this development in the global coverage of the examples he uses. Overall, Whatmore presents a realistic yet optimistic picture of the subject’s future, in which H.P.T. lays claim to substantial importance for future political thinking rooted in Whatmore’s unusually confident sense that we can directly learn from the past about the present.