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CONTINGENCY INPOLITICAL THEORY

Today it is almost fashionable to speak of contingency in politicaltheory, philosophy and historiography1. This fashion is, how-

ever, a novel phenomenon. In the sixties and seventies the sociologi-cal jargon of structures, functions, processes etc., with its implica-tion of “necessities”, was dominant. This jargon still shapes much ofthe journalistic or administrative discourse and is visible for exam-ple in the common lamentations of the dangers of globalization. WhenJohn Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment (1975) summarized theexperience of certain Anglophone historians by expressing the ideaof politics to consist in the “dealing with the contingent event”, heprobably was more innovative than he himself understood. The re-cent contributions to contingency of politics could be related to thisformula.

Why is contingency so fashionable today? It would not make anysense of “explaining away” it by some external “factors”. The pointis, rather, that the idea of contingency is so multi-faceted that almosteveryone can recourse to some of its faces to one’s own purposes.

Let us simply enumerate some of its facets, in an attempt to trans-late it. One is the simple facticity, something that “is” but has nogrounds or reasons for being, like the Sartrean être-en-soi. Another

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point is marked when contingency is identified as lack of founda-tions or sufficient grounds. A third nuance is the pure hazard orcoincidence. This is to be distinguished from the good or bad luck,as an expression of the powers of the fortuna. Contingency some-times also refers to a point of connection or “touch” as Oakeshottput it. Per definitionem contingent is “something that could be oth-erwise”. For political theory the most interesting variant of it is: “some-thing that can be done otherwise”. In this sense contingency refersto occasion, opportunity or Chance in the Weberian sense. It simul-taneously contains elements of revisability, mutability, alterabilityetc. The converse side of these aspects are the nuances of being timely,fragile, destructible, bound to failure or decay etc. In relation to timecontingency is always something unexpected and unpredictable,something impossible to control.

What makes the concept so fashionable and fascinating is just itsmultiplicity of nuances, which tend to make tacit shifts, when wetalk on contingency in a specific context. Indeed, contingency is aparadigmatic expression of the Koselleckian idea that concepts assuch are ambiguous and contestable. In the controversy surround-ing contingency, we can distinguish important disagreements con-cerning the concept itself from those on the value or acceptability ofcontingency, as well as from those concerning its significance in thesituation or in historical changes.

How then to “deal with”, or better yet, to “play with” contingency?Contingency used to be a bête noire of the philosophers, and theyonly knew how to play against contingency, by denying its reality orsignificance, or by trying to eliminate or eradicate it. In the contem-porary debate an acknowledgement of the reality and importancecontingency is obvious, and its sheer elimination would appear tobe something beyond human powers. This mere acknowledgementhas, however, made possible new forms of reducing or “taming” con-tingency. It can be marginalized in its significance, reduced in itsextent, restricted to specific fields of topics, normalized into some-thing harmless, functionalized into service of proper aims, regulatedinto something controllable and so on.

Elections are “the contingent event” par excellence in the daily poli-tics: a source of chances, choices and alternances. Around the elec-tions, however, most of the aforementioned strategies of taming con-

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CONTINGENCY IN POLITICAL THEORY

tingency are actively used in various combinations, thus leaving theindividual voter with litle to choose from. It is no wonder that thetopic of Politikversdrossenheit is a commonplace in the daily politicaldiscourse in the Western world.

The rehabilitatation of politics seems, thus, to revalorize contin-gency. But how can we celebrate contingency? Rorty’s reversal of theclassical slogan into “freedom is the recognition of contingency” doesnot quite seem sufficient. Simply recognizing contingency does notprevent its taming. Contingency requires a reappraisal of the activityof politicking, as something more important than the substantivepolicy goals or procedural regulations of the polity. The results ofpolitical games should be left open, to be understood as the result ofclever playing and of fortuna in relations to other players.

Still, it seems that it is difficult to speak of contingency without atleast implictly engaging in its reduction. How, then, can we concep-tualize contingency without, through this very act, already tamingit? The possibility of doing so consists, to borrow Quentin Skinner’sterminology, in a rhetorical redescription of the concept, which al-ters its “range of refererence”. Only then could contingency appearas a politicizing move.

In Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment the contingency of fortuna, inwhichever form it was evoked, remained an already existing contin-gency, a background of all human actions, to which individuals onlyhad to adapt themselves. The fashionable slogan of contingency inthe contemporary discussion still seems to assume that the only con-tingency is that of the fortuna.

In the twentieth century political theory, however, we, at leastimplicitly, know, however, another figure of contingency, which isperhaps best manifested in the Weberian concept of Chance. ForWeber Chance is an operative concept, which makes human actionsand their relations to each other intelligible. In the Weberian sense,Chance marks an occasion or an opportunity, not in the rare andextraordinary sense of the Greek kairos or the Machiavellian occasione,but rather, as something omnipresent. For Weber even the extremelytight and bureaucratized structures and processes are to be madeintelligible in the nominalistic terms of the complexes of Chancen.

A precondition of the rethinking of contingency in terms of Chancenwas, in the ‘Weberian moment’ a situational analysis according to

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which fortuna had vanished. Weber saw the tendency towardsbureaucratization as omnipresent and irresistible, a force which prob-ably would “one day” extinguish the moments of freedom. Hisreconceptualization of the contingency of politics in terms of Chancenwas a move to restrict the tendency of bureaucratization. Weber over-estimated the role of bureaucratization, while there are signs of areturn of the fortuna in the contemporary world. Weber’s concept ofChance remains a key innovation for the contemporary political theory,but the return of the fortuna, as it is manifested by actualization sev-eral figures, such as Beck’s concept of risk, in obliges us again torethink the contingency of politics.

* * *

In this volume of Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought the rethinkingof contingency is practised both as main theme and as a thematicbackground of the history of concepts. Explicitly the topic is dealtby Maureen Whitebrook, who combines a political reading of twocontemporary novels with the discussion of contingency in the con-temporary anglophone political theory – with the interesting resultthat, in the perspective of contingency, novels seem to do better po-litical theory than professional political theorists. A strong supportfor this thesis can be found in John Nelson’s article, in which the spynovels of John Le Carré are read both as an extension of the classicalpolitical thought since Hobbes and as a critique of the contemporarytheories of international politics, implicitly just from the viewpointof contingency, which spies both try to reduce and turn to their ownadvantage.

An increasing acknowledgement has, however, reached also thepolitical, cultural and social theories of today, and and its relevancefor the Zeitdiagnose is discussed in Risto Eräsaari’s article. The rel-evance of the contingency for the understanding the changing prac-tices of contemporary politics is also thematized by Eeva Aarnio’sand Kyösti Pekonen’s article on the Finnish party programmes.

As opposed to the classical analytical ideal of “defining” of con-cept, contingency plays a key role in the formation and use of con-

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cepts in the interdisciplinary approach called “history of concepts”or “conceptual history”, or with a German term Begriffsgeschichte. Inthis volume we publish four of the contributions of the first interna-tional conference, arranged at the Finnish Institute in London inJune 1998. An international forum for scholars was founded at thatoccasion and a “History of Concepts Newsletter” has been recently beenpublished by Karin Tilmans and Wyger Velema at the University ofAmsterdam.

Each of the contribution on the history of concepts publishedhere also emphasizes its links to contingency, although not alwaysusing the word. Melvin Richter’s “overview” indicates to some newproblematics and challenges to Begriffsgeschichte and the problem ofcontingency is emphasized by the contestability of political and so-cial concepts. Janet Coleman discusses the chances and limitations ofthe history of concepts for the history of ancient and medieval po-litical thought, claiming interestingly that Reinhart Koselleck’sapproach sometimes unduly simplifies the contingencies of history.Iisa Räsänen, in her review of the Dutch volume History of Conceptswants to apply conceptual history to the analysis of contemporarypolitics and she also criticizes the search for “foundations”, in thesense of looking for a definite view on the relations between wordsand concepts or meaning and concepts. I have sketched a somewhatunconventional perspective for comparing the work of two paradig-matic representatives of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck andQuentin Skinner, by seeing as a common point that their work “canbe read as contributions to … extending contingency to concepts”(for Koselleck cf. also Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought vol. 1, 1997)

In his response to my contribution Quentin Skinner assesses hisown intellectual development and especially the role of his specific“rhetorical turn”. He explicitly refutes the communis opinio that hisapproach is opposed to the history of concepts and stresses that es-pecially some of his own contributions to the concept of the statewell can be included to conceptual history. In addition, it is worthnoticing that Skinner also alludes to the role of contingency for hisapproach in relation to the older views on the history of thought.Characterizing his critique of Lovejoy’s programme for the history ofideas in the late sixties Skinner writes: “I tried … to speak up for amore radical contingency in the history of thought”. He also evokes

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contingency when assessing his own turn towards the work of thetheorists of classical eloquence: “I … have come to share their morecontingent understanding of normative concepts and the fluid vo-cabularies in which they are generally expressed”. In terms of con-tingency Skinner’s programme, thus, can be interpreted as consist-ing in two historically separate moves, each of which radicalizes theheuristic use of contingency in his understanding of conceptualchanges.

KARI PALONEN

Notes

1The concept has now reached also the level of the weeklies. A Germanauthor writes in the Zeit : “Woran berauschen sich die Zuschauer imFußballstadion! Nein, nicht Bier. Die Zeit “… sie berauschen sich anden Mysterien der Kontingenz”. Genau denen bin ich auf der Spur: denMysterien der Kontingenz. Sie fehlt heute in keinem kulturphilo-sophischen Text.” (Dieter Zimmer, Die Zeit, 8.4. 1999, p.2). Even thoughtHerr Zimmer finally claims that “Kontingenz oft gar nichts bedeutet”, isboth his characterization of its use as a slogan and his reference to anearlier Zeit article on the contingency of the football – to me always animportant source of illustrating political action – characteristic of thesituation.