Katherine H. Bullock

One of the reasons the canon comes under attack from multiculturalists is not so much due to what each individual classic text may or may not say about the problems and solutions of political community, but that the whole package is presented as the ultimate and definitive word on notions of the good life. The way the canon is conceived of and presented by scholars working in its traditions carries with it an arrogance of exclusion that can be infuriating to those who also find wisdom outside the classic texts of the canon. Thus, one of the real problems of the canon is its lack of awareness that it is just one of many different traditions.4 This has been brought to the fore with the transition to a multicultural West after World War II, growing numbers of non-western scholars in western academy, and the rise of the “global village.”

Due to the importance of creating spaces for non-western voices to be heard in discussions affecting the global political community, my paper aims to make room for other traditions of political thought in the teaching and study of political theory. This need not entail (completely) the undoing of the canon, nor the inserting of non-western thinkers into it.5 All that is needed is to conceptualize the canon not as “the” history of political thought, but as “a” tradition of political thought that all can learn from, alongside other traditions.

A crucial first step is to make the canon more aware of its own construction, its own “inventedness” as a tradition.6 An illuminating way to highlight the canon’s (Eurocentric) formation is to look at the relationship between western and Islamic political theory. Though many might wonder if there is any substantial connection between western and Islamic political thinking, the traditions of western political thought do have significant and interesting interactions with Islamic intellectual traditions. At a time when some in both the western and Islamic worlds are pointing to an absolute incompatibility, even an impending “clash” between the two civilizations, drawing attention to the intellectual relationships between the two worlds, and the intersections and divergences between the two traditions, is a promising way to contribute toward a lessening of tension.7

So I aim to bring attention to the constructed nature of the canon of the history of political thought with an emphasis on the relationship between western and Islamic intellectual traditions. I look first at the presumed origins of the history of political thought in ancient Greece. Next, I discuss the relationship between the canon and western identity. Finally, I consider to what extent the canon’s composition is based on a secular understanding of the relationship between reason and revelation.

An Intercultural Philosophical Tradition

The standard survey course/textbook places the origins of western political theory, or political theory simply, in ancient Greece, especially the city of Athens, with Plato (427-347 BCE) and his student Aristotle (384-22 BCE). After Aristotle, the standard account suggests, there is a kind of stagnation until Machiavelli (1469-1532) comes on the scene in Italy, some 1,800 years later. An expanded version of the history of political thought will trace in more detail the thinkers who lived and wrote in between Aristotle and Machiavelli, the Stoics, the Epicureans, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and so on. But the standard account will typically skip the years between Aristotle and Machiavelli. The assumption is that Machiavelli is the first thinker since Aristotle to break with the “classical” tradition of political theory, and that he marks a transition between the “ancients” and the “moderns.” The typical short account of the history of political thought carries with it problematic assumptions.

In the first place, that the transition from Aristotle to Machiavelli in the standard account so easily coincides with a Eurocentric interpretation of the linear progress of history should make us uneasy (with ancient Greece as the cradle of western civilization, going into a kind of remission during the “Dark Ages” and waking up again during the “Renaissance.”) The standard story of history in western textbooks treats history as the narrative of a “western mainstream” and “non-western” periphery. “Mainstream” history:

includes all West-European history since it became civilized, of course; and, before that time, selected periods from areas to the southeast: Greek history ‘till the time of the Roman Empire (but not since – the Byzantines do not count as mainstream); and the Near East until the rise of the Greeks, but not since … The ‘mainstream’ of history, in the traditional image, runs through northwestern Europe in the Dark Ages of the Merovingians – although everyone knows that the Byzantines and the Muslims (and the Indians and the Chinese) were far more civilized then.8

It is, as Hodgson notes, not a good picture of world history, simply one that “allows us to construct a world history in which our own cultural ancestors hold most of the attention.”9 It is also a Eurocentric vision of history that has political overtones and implications.

The canon of the history of political thought suffers from the same presuppositions, notably claiming ancient Greece as its cradle, treating that history as synonymous with “the history of western political thought,” and tracing the “progress” of political theory as running from ancient Greece to the Romans to the Latin world thence to Western European thinkers, even though this is not the story of the transmission of the Platonic and Aristotelian corpuses to the West. Nowhere is the Eurocentric vision of the history of the canon more evident than in its claiming Plato and Aristotle, ancient pagan Greeks, as the “founders” of western political thought. This is made plain by an alternative story of the history of western political thought, which I will shortly recount. Such an alternative history complicates the canon’s understanding of itself, especially its exclusive claim to Plato and Aristotle.

The survey course form of this alternative history would be as follows:

After the deaths of Plato and Aristotle, their teachings continued to be studied at academies in the Hellenistic world until they were closed down, or transformed, by rulers and thinkers of the Christianised Roman empire. By 200, “there existed among the Greeks of the empire only the Platonic academies at Alexandria and Athens and their lesser reflections at Apamea and Pergamum.”10 The Emperor Justinian closed the Academy at Athens in 529, which left only the school at Alexandria, by then radically Christianized.11 The philosophers and teachers of Plato and Aristotle fled to the Persian Sassanian empire, where they sought refuge in cities such as Jundishapur (located near Baghdad), already a distinguished international center of learning.12

By 651, Muslim Arab armies had conquered Arabia, the Syrian and Egyptian provinces of the Byzantine Empire and all of Persia.13 Thus the Islamic empire became heir to the cumulative learning of the empires of Hellenic Greece, the Romans, and Persia. Under Caliphs al-Mansur (754-75), Harun al-Rashid (786-809), al-Ma’mun (813-33), and other patrons, Greek astronomical, mathematical, medical, philosophical and other scientific texts were translated into Arabic.14 By the ninth century most of the Platonic and Aristotelian corpuses, and several important Greek commentaries on them, had been translated into Arabic, including Plato’s Republic and Laws, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.15 Muslim philosophers were enthusiastic disciples of Plato and Aristotle, although many of them were condemned by Muslim jurists for incorporating aspects of Greek philosophy the jurists held to be contrary to Qur’anic revelation.

The Latin Christian world, which had lost touch with the continuous tradition of Greek philosophy as early as 300,16 was brought up to date commencing in the mid twelfth century, when the first translations of Arabic philosophy into Latin were made by Dominic Gundisalvi and his Arabic speaking assistants in Toledo.17 For the next three hundred years, Islamic (and Jewish) philosophers were among the “most important influences on scholastic philosophers and theologians.”18 Medieval Latin scholars relied on Muslim philosophers, especially Ibn Rushd (1126-98, known in the Latin world as Averroes), for their understanding of Plato and Aristotle.19

Latin translations of Averroes’ commentaries were often bound together with translations of Aristotle’s own works.20 Aristotle was known simply as “the Philosopher,” and Ibn Rushd as “the Commentator.”21 Averroism became a school of thought in the Latin West, which was then declared heretical by the Church.22 In spite of this, Averroism continued to have an influence on European scholars well into the sixteenth century. John of Jandun’s (1285/9-1328) interpretation of Averroes was influential among “scholars in Bologna, Padua, and Erfurt in the late fourteenth century … Krakow in the mid fifteenth … [and] Italy in the sixteenth.23

European reliance on the Muslim philosophers waned as the Latin translations “were edited and brought into print in the late fifteenth and early sixteen century.”24 Direct access to the original Greek manuscripts further lessened the reliance on Muslim texts and commentaries.25 The subsequent modern reaction against scholasticism sidelined Muslim (and Christian) philosophical influence more fully. 26 Subsequently, European political thinkers developed the secular tradition that is at the heart of today’s western political philosophy, and is reflected in the names of the modern theorists distinguished by the canon.

According to this alternative history of political thought, ancient Greece cannot be claimed as exclusively western by the western philosophical tradition. Rather, Plato and Aristotle are the ancestors of a philosophical tradition that criss-crosses between several different cultures and religions: pagan ancient Greece, the Christianised Roman empire, the Christian Byzantine empire, the Zoroastrian Persian empire, the Islamic empire, Latin Christendom, secular Europe and later, its colonies, now known as the West. This establishes, as Wilson remarks, a “Euro-Arab” tradition of scholarship. 27 Indeed, Richard Walzer used to advise classical scholars to read the Arabic commentaries to finish their work as scholars of Greek philosophy.28 The transmission of the Greek texts is a rich story of intercultural communication, whereby different theorists of different religious and cultural backgrounds have shared in the “conversation” about politics and the good life.29

It is a narrative in which ancient Greece provides common foundations both to aspects of the Islamic civilization and the European, later western, civilization. It is only in this broader sense that Plato and Aristotle can be said to be founders of western political thought.

This story of an intercultural philosophical tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle is well known to medievalists and Islamic studies scholars (indeed, to Muslims in general, who often take great pride in the importance of medieval Muslim philosophy and its contributions to the West).

The way I have told the history, however, is not well known (if known at all) to students of the standard account of the history of political thought. In addition, the formative role played by Muslim philosophers on the western political tradition as I have recounted it here is contentious: the more common version is that Muslim philosophers simply “absorbed, preserved, and retransmitted Greek thought […] to Europe during the Middle-Ages, thereby ensuring the continuity of the western philosophical tradition.”30 In other words, all that the Muslim thinkers did was passively preserve what are essentially “western” ideas.

That the passive role of Muslim thinkers as transmitters of western ideas is a commonly accepted notion indicates that my telling of an unconventional history of political thought challenges the very identity of the western intellectual tradition, because the alternative account disputes the notion that Plato and Aristotle are the founders of an exclusively western canon of political theory, and also because it brings into view characters not thought of as westerners. Some readers may agree with my point about the sloppiness of the elision between the phrases “the history of political thought” and “the history of western political thought,” and seek to be more precise in the future, but many might object to my implication that there is something wrong with considering ancient Greece as the foundation of western political thought. After all, ancient Greece is part of Europe, hence part of the history of European political thought, and as Europe is part of the West, it is part of the history of western political thought.

But consider the implications of Hodgson’s observation that “[c]lassical Greece is called ‘western,’ though Byzantine Greece is often included in the ‘East.’”31 Indeed, when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, Europe thought of it as part of the “East.” In 1902, D.C. Hogarth, an English archaeologist, included Greece as part of the “Near East,” and during WWII the British Middle East Air Command stretched from Malta to Iran, and Syria to Ethiopia. As late as a 1948, a UN Economic Commission for the Middle East included Greece in its definition of the Middle East.32

At what point, then, did Greece become a western country? How is it possible to consider ancient Greece as the foundation of western civilization and political philosophy, when the rest of the time Greece is not considered part of the West? How can the Merovigians and not the Byzantines be seen as the “true” heirs of ancient Greece? Conversely, if the criterion for inclusion in the tradition of western political thought is being from a country that is now seen as part of the West, why exclude Muslim philosophers, like Ibn Rushd (Averroes), from Al-Andalusia (Muslim Spain)? Why exclude theorists who are part of a continuous chain of the transmission of the teachings of Plato and Aristotle from ancient Greece to modern Europe? It is not, after all, as if the canon as it is currently framed represents the history of a single religious tradition, nor that of a single cultural tradition.

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