How Philosophy Becomes Possible: XII. When History Becomes Philosophical

If the structures through which we know can themselves become objects of inquiry, then a further possibility opens.

Human beings do not simply know the world.

They live in societies, inherit languages, institutions and traditions, and act within circumstances they did not choose.

Those circumstances can also become philosophical problems.

For much of the earlier tradition, political and social questions were certainly part of philosophy. Aristotle had analysed constitutions, citizenship and the good life. But the emerging modern situation makes another question increasingly difficult to avoid:

How did the world in which we find ourselves come to be this way?

This is not quite the same as asking what a good society should be.

It asks how particular forms of social and political order arise, change and disappear.

The question becomes especially pressing as inherited structures of authority begin to lose their unquestioned status. Religious conflict, changing forms of government, expanding commerce, new encounters with other societies and the consolidation of powerful states all make political order appear less like a natural given and more like something historically produced.

If institutions have histories, then they might have been otherwise.

And if they might have been otherwise, they become available for explanation.

This introduces contingency into the social world.

The question “Why do people obey?” can become distinct from “Why should people obey?”

The question “Why is this institution here?” can become distinct from “What should an institution be?”

The distinction is philosophically important.

It creates a space between what is inherited and what is necessary.

Hobbes will eventually exploit this space with extraordinary force. Instead of beginning with an established political order, he asks what would follow from imagining human beings without it. Political society can then appear not as an unquestionable natural arrangement but as something constructed under particular conditions.

The significance of such an argument extends beyond Hobbes.

Once society can be understood as something made, maintained and transformed by human beings, human beings become participants in the explanation of their own world.

The world of politics is no longer simply part of the order into which people are born.

It has become historical.

And history itself therefore acquires philosophical significance.

A society has a past.

Its institutions have origins.

Its present arrangements embody choices, conflicts and contingencies.

Its future is not completely determined by its present.

This introduces a new dimension into the possibility-space of philosophy.

Nature had already become something to investigate.

Now society can become something to investigate in the same spirit.

But the analogy is not exact.

Human beings do not merely observe social arrangements. They participate in them. The concepts with which society understands itself can alter the society being understood.

This makes social and historical inquiry reflexive in a new way.

Philosophy can ask not only:

What is society?

but:

How did this society become possible?

And eventually:

What other forms of society might be possible?

The question of possibility has therefore moved beyond nature and knowledge.

It has entered history.

And once history becomes a field of genuine possibilities, philosophy can no longer treat human beings merely as knowers situated in a world.

They are also makers of worlds they did not themselves begin.