The labyrinth of politics : a conceptual approach to the modes of the political in the Scottish enlightenment

Abstract

Oili Pulkkisen valtio-opin väitöstutkimuksessa analysoidaan poliittisen ilmiötä skotlantilaisessa valistuksessa 1700-luvun jälkipuoliskolla. Näennäisen ongelmattomana pidetty politiikka-käsite paljastuu moniulotteiseksi tiedon, elämänalan ja taidon käsitekimpuksi. Työssä sovelletaan käsitehistoriallista metodologiaa uudella tavalla. Keskeinen tutkimuskohde on politiikan käsite, jota tutkittavat ajattelijat eivät pitäneet lainkaan ongelmallisena.

Taking the polit-vocabulary – politics, polity, policy, political and a politician – as a point of departure, this study reconstructs the idea of the political in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. A conceptual method – a particular mode of conceptual history – plays a crucial role in this study. The political is conceptualised by reading the spontaneous use of the politconceptions, metaphors and allusions of the political. According to present interpretation, politics as knowledge was interwoven to ethics and jurisprudence as well as the political was subordinated to the social, or even synonymous with it. This study contemplates an alternative interpretation of the political as a particular sphere of human life and knowledge. Three modes of the political can be reconstructed in the Scottish texts: the political as politics, the political as a particular sphere of human life, and the political as prudent activity. The internal differentiation of moral science, especially elementary lectures on morals, reflected politics as a particular branch of moral science. The political as a sphere was reflected by the concept of a political society, which represented a particular mode of human life. The differentiation of the political sphere was constructed by histories of the origins of political societies and by revisions of contractarian theories. The political as activity, or as activityoriented prudence, was separate from politics as science. Further, there were different modes of political prudence: a philosopher, a prince, a legislator, an ambassador and a leader in the Scottish texts. Scottish philosophers reflected the political rather by revising classical vocabulary of the political rather than by inventing new concepts and conceptions. Despite this the Scottish polit-vocabulary represented a departure from the Aristotelian unity of ethics, justice and politics.