Reading literary texts as Political Thought and Intellectual History

This paper examines the significance of the mode/form of writing and Genres in the texts considered under intellectual history or history of political thought. Particularly it asks whether an author's preference for a mode of writing or multiple forms changes how their works are interpreted/treated as objects of political thought. Although intellectual historians do not entirely ignore the form's relevance, they relegate it to mere rhetoric or authorial idiosyncrasy intended for persuasion or fame. While the contextualist method considers contexts beyond immediate ideological conflict, political thought remains limited in prioritising apparent political disputes of the time. But for a few literary historians, the political implications of texts are not the primary focus of literary history. One can argue that this paper raises an illusory problem as it ignores the disciplinary differences between political and literary history. This division is easy in most cases because of the textual form and the author's declaration of political intentions. For instance, Hobbes's scholarship has primarily focussed on Hobbes's ostensibly political texts such as De Cive, Leviathan, and Behemoth. However, there are some cases, there is no clear separation between the literary and political works of the thinker. This interrupts the complementarity between political history and literary history. For instance, Shakespeare and Milton used literary forms such as drama and poetry. To deprioritise these figures as non-political would be to misunderstand the politics of Elizabethan England and the English Civil War. Appreciating the possibility of political arguments in such sources allows for a broader understanding of the thinker's philosophical framework. Consequently, the political relevance of such sources cannot be revealed without appreciating the literary and aesthetic character of the text beyond the content. First, I outline Leo Strauss's method, where historical texts are regarded as interventions in eternal debates concerning philosophical concepts, albeit hidden within historical contingencies. After examining the limitations of this approach as tending toward speculation, I consider two intentionalist alternatives that acknowledge authorial intention without characterising it as interventions in philosophical debates. I analyse Foucault's method where historical literary texts are understood as artefacts of a wider cultural and social discourse in the next section. Nevertheless, Foucault's structuralism does not leave much space for authorial agency. Next, I discuss the contextualist method, where texts are interpreted as ideological interventions in their immediate historical context. Contextualism overcomes the structuralist barrier by applying Austin's Speech Act theory to understand language and meaning. However, Skinner's conception of the contextualist method is limited as it considers ostensibly political texts alone while conceding the possibility that literary texts may have political significance. In contrast, I propose two reconfigurations of the method, expanding it to literary texts. Unlike propositional texts, I argue that literary texts have the unique advantage of having political significance not only through their content but also with regard to authorial choice of genre and its un/conventional application.