On Medieval Political Thought

IN PRAISE OF PROLEPS IS: MEANING, SIGNIFI CANCE AND THE MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICAL THOUGHT Francis Oakley 1 Abstract: To the historian concerned with the long development of Western poli tical thi nki ng, themedieval phase hasfrequent ly provedto be dif fic ult to accessand thesi g- nificance of its various aspects or components hard to assess. One way around that dif- ficulty is to sharpen the focus by adopting a world-historical perspective and by taking as one’s criterion of significance the degree to which the components of the medieval legacy helped shape the unquestionable singularity of Western political thought. Take that tack, however, and one is likely to fall victim to charges of having succumbed to some sort of ‘mythology of prolepsis’. That being so, it is long since time to respond, as here, with a word or two ‘in praise of prolepsis’. ‘[I]t is true’, or so Umberto Eco once memorably put it, that ‘the Middle Ages turned us into Western animals’. 2 But to polit ical philos ophe rs — or, more properly, to those among them not altogether allergic to matters historical — the centuries we are accustomed to labelling as ‘medieval’ have always posed something of a challenge. If, in addressing the historical dimension of their subj ect, they have not quite been able to bring themse lves to jump directl y from Aristotle (or, maybe, Cicero) to Hobbes (or, maybe, Machiavelli), their engagement with medieval modes of political thinking has often been limited to a probing in the thirteenth century of Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, though preceded sometimes in the fifth century by a puzzled glance at Augustine’s De civitate dei and followed, in the fourteenth, by a relieved encounter with Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor pacis . Selecting the appropriate texts from Aquinas has not proved to be too difficult, but an exclusive focus on those text s has tended to promote the odd assumpt ion that that great but singular thinker can safely be taken on matters political to be a typical spokesman for what used to be called ‘the medieval mind’. The addition to the putative syl labus of texts dra wn from Augus tine or Mar sig lio has much, the n, to HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVII. No. 3. Autumn 2006 1 The Oakl ey Center for the Humanities & Soc ial Sciences, Wil liams Col lege, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA. Email: [email protected] 2 Umberto Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in U. Eco, Travels in Hyperrea lity: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, New York and London, 1986), pp. 64–5. In doing so, Eco stressed the fact that ‘both Americans and Europeans are inheritors of the Weste rn legacy, and [that ] all the problems of the Weste rn world emerged in the Middl e Ages’. He went on to list an array of transformative medieval innovations from the technological to ‘the modern concept of the national state’, or from ‘our contemporary notion of love as a devast ating unhappy happines s’ to the conflict between church and state. ‘It is not surprising’, he adds, ‘that we all go back to that period every time we ask ourselves about our origins.’ Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction

On Medieval Political Thought

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