In 1993, the editors of a pathbreaking collection of essays exploring the history of political thought in modern Ireland issued the discipline with a rallying cry. Noting that ‘the history of political ideas in Ireland’ remains ‘largely unwritten’, they implored colleagues to cease searching for the history of Irish ideas in a traditional canon of ‘classic texts’, and to draw instead upon ‘recent methodological developments in intellectual history’, notably the emergence of the contextualist approach associated with the University of Cambridge, to recover the broader intellectual culture that shaped the political evolution of modern Ireland (D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political thought in Ireland since the seventeenth century (London, 1993)). Three decades on, it seems opportune to ponder the extent to which this methodological injunction has been heeded.
Certainly, the time when an historian of modern Ireland could justify an essay in political thought simply by gesturing to a dearth of literature on the subject has passed. To take just a few examples : the contributions of scholars like Jane Ohlmeyer and Ian Campbell have shed new light on the role of ideas in shaping politics and religious life during the early modern period. With a focus on the eighteenth century, S. J. Connolly, Ian McBride and Richard Bourke have effectively situated Ireland in the context of wider European and north Atlantic debates in political theory, work that historians like Stephen Small and Ultán Gillen have built on in reconstructing the political ideas and languages that animated the United Irish rebellion of 1798. James Stafford and Andrew Phemister have explored the neglected role of Ireland in wider European and Anglo-American political debates regarding commerce, property ownership and empire during a global era of war and revolution.
Thomas Dolan, Rose Luminiello and Patrick Doyle have examined the complex intersection of religious, political and economic ideas in nineteenth-century Ireland. David Dwan, Owen McGee and Matthew Kelly have contributed much to reconstruct the nationalist and republican ideas that preoccupied intellectuals engaged with Young Ireland movement and, laterally, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.), while several scholars have challenged reductive portrayals of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as a simple ebullition of ethno-sectarian animosity, highlighting a heterogeneity of political perspectives on both sides of the conflict. Suffice to say, the writing of the history of political thought in modern Ireland is definitively underway.
But for all these significant advances, much work remains to be done. This is particularly true in respect of the ideas that shaped Irish politics during the revolutionary period between 1912 and 1922. Indeed, it is striking that for all the scholarly attention that has been devoted to the revolution in the context of the decade of centenaries, there has been very little new work published in the history of political thought, especially when set against the flourishing of scholarship connected with subjects such as gender, trauma and commemoration. It remains the case, therefore, that — with a few distinguished exceptions — there has been little attempt to situate the ideological leadership of Ireland's revolutionary generation in their proper intellectual contexts, or to excavate and reconstruct the diversity and complexity of political opinion that obtained among relevant actors.
In part, this historiographical deficit may be understood to derive from the intense politicisation of historical writing and literary criticism that occurred against the backdrop of the Troubles — a conflict that, significantly, coincided with the initial emergence and expansion of the contextualist approach to intellectual history. In consciously detaching academic analysis of the past from hitherto regnant nationalist and unionist pieties, the so-called ‘revisionist’ turn in Irish historical scholarship from the 1960s unquestionably contributed much to enhance our understanding of the revolutionary period and its aftermath. But in endeavouring to emancipate Irish public life from the distorting influence of nationalist and sectarian ideologies, principally by exposing the historical fallacies underlying such beliefs, revisionist historiography exhibited, perhaps inevitably, an admonitory or didactic tone in which divergent historical opinion was more readily critiqued than it was contextualised or explained. Concerned to promote a spirit of liberalism and ecumenism in the present, revisionist scholarship exhibited little interest in rendering intelligible to a contemporary audience the range of intricate, if occasionally morally distasteful, ideological motivations proffered by the intellectual leadership of Ireland's revolution generation, especially by those willing to recourse to violence in pursuit of their political beliefs.
The ideological underpinnings of the Irish revolution have, consequently, tended to be framed in terms of identity or ethnicity, as a clash of nations or cultures, and arrayed under the frequently undifferentiated banners of nationalism and unionism. It is depicted commonly as a contest, not of contrasting political perspectives connected with complex conceptual issues such as representation, trade and empire, but as an ebullition of ancient communal or tribal hatreds — animated by Anglophobia and assorted other excrescences of ethno-sectarian chauvinism — undeserving of seriously scholarly consideration. Furthermore, on the handful of occasions when political ideas have been discussed as a meaningful causal factor in shaping the Irish revolution, they have tended to be framed as a simple rhetorical cover intended to obscure the primal and material expression of self-interest which it is the proper role of the historian to uncover. As is made clear by the range of insights generated in R. F. Foster's sensitive exploration, in Vivid faces, of ‘the quiet revolution’ that obtained ‘in the hearts and minds of young middle-class Irish people from the 1890s’, this earlier tendency to disregard the perspectives proffered by contemporary actors exerted a profound, impoverishing effect on our understanding of the intellectual world that produced the Irish revolution.
In this context, the decision of Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought to publish a blue book exploring the ideas that animated the revolutionary period is as timely for the Irish historical discipline as it as it is welcome. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, a series edited by Quentin Skinner, has long been established as the foremost student series of texts in political theory, covering everything from Plato's Laws to the international thought of W. E. B. du Bois. The inclusion in the series of a comprehensive edited collection of primary source materials produced on Ireland between 1909 and 1922 is significant, therefore, not only for making such texts more accessible to students, but for recognising the Irish revolution as an important event in the history of political ideas.
The book opens with a comprehensive introduction from Bourke, elucidating both the chronological narrative of the revolution and the historiographical necessity that more attention is paid to ideas in our understanding of the period. Stressing the degree of ‘artful but distorting literary construction’ (p. x) entailed in portraying twentieth-century Irish history as a contest of two monolithic and unchanging creeds, Bourke calls upon colleagues to deconstruct more granularly and contextualise the assorted perspectives, convictions and beliefs underlying the oftentimes uneasy and invariably intellectually heterodox coalitions that composed those cleavages. ‘Nationalism, like unionism, did not comprise a single doctrine’, Bourke reminds us, concluding provocatively that the intellectual ‘fissures’ discernible within those rival camps is such as to render the very categories an ‘empty generalisation’ (pp xii, xli).
The selected source materials that comprise the thirty-one subsequent chapters — taking the reader from Constance Markievicz's influential 1909 publication, Women, ideals and the nation, to Ronald McNeill's 1922 defence of partition, Ulster's stand for Union — do much to substantiate that contention. Supplemented with valuable explanatory materials (such as biographies and detailed contextual footnotes), the writings included illustrate vividly both the diversity of opinion that circulated among nationalist and unionist commentators during the revolutionary period, and the heterodoxy of the arguments proffered to advance oftentimes contrasting political perspectives.
As always with a book such as this, one can quibble with certain editorial decisions. It is arguable, for instance, that James Connolly, for all the skill and originality of his writing, is over-represented relative to the actual influence of his ideas in shaping the revolution. The inclusion of some more socially and economically conservative republican voices — like, for instance, those of Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins, both of whom are striking in their absence from this collection — might have provided readers with a more rounded picture of the intellectual shape of the nationalist coalition. The relative peripherality of religious ideas, too, is noteworthy when one considers how powerfully such beliefs informed politics in Ireland during the period. In this regard, the inclusion of works by thinkers like Desmond FitzGerald or James Hogan — both of whom were engaged deeply with contemporary Catholic debates regarding alternative forms of political representation at the same time as being members of the I.R.B. — might have deepened readers’ comprehension of the complex range of intellectual influences that shaped the politics of the revolution.
Nevertheless, these are ultimately minor criticisms of a collection that succeeds emphatically in recovering the diversity of political opinion that conditioned political developments in Ireland between 1912 and 1922. The editors warrant particular praise for their inclusion of documents like Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant and the Easter Proclamation which are too often overlooked as important, programmatic statements of popular political belief. The onus now, surely, rests with us as historians to represent more accurately such intellectual heterogeneity in our depiction of the period.
