John McClelland's vigorous and very large volume A History of Western Political Thought is not merely, as he frankly proclaims in his foreword, "an old-fashioned history of political thought", it is also an extremely personal one. Almost anyone could derive entertainment or instruction from some portion of its 800 pages. But it is hard to imagine a reader who could seriously hope to benefit from most of them.

McClelland himself attributes the mildly archaic character of his work to its being devoted to great texts, whether texts deemed great in themselves, or those which may reasonably be thought great because of their influence on many other texts, or even, like Mein Kampf, because of the dramatic impact which they have exerted more directly on the public world of politics. Besides the 32 chapters (many of which are principally devoted to individual thinkers), the volume also contains 40 brief biographies. There are some surprising candidates: Anthony Crosland and Gustave Le Bon, for example. Baruch Spinoza and Hugo Grotius, by contrast, not merely fail to rate a biography, they do not even scrape into the extensive and relatively serviceable index.

It would be unreasonable to criticise McClelland for lacking "a particular story line". His initial intention to treat the history of political thought through a special concentration on the predicament of the ruled proved hard to implement. Not only was it in predictable tension with an approach focused in the end firmly on great texts, it also ran up against the predictable discretion of many of the texts' authors over just what they did believe about those whom they saw as the objects of rule.

What is perhaps less defensible is the lack of any attempt on McClelland's part to set out and defend the principles of inclusion and exclusion that led him to define the scope of his volume as he did, and the corresponding absence of any apparent concern as to its readership.

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Most academic writers of 800-page books have at least tacitly in mind a captive academic audience. There are many courses on the history of political thought in the still-proliferating universities of the West, almost all of them devoted to considering the history of political thinking in Europe and its diaspora, with some extension into the fate of one of the more indiscreet episodes in western political thinking in Russia and China. As a consequence, there are many textbooks devoted to the same subject matter, the best of which at present is indeed somewhat old-fashioned as it was composed more than half a century ago: the late George T. Sabine's A History of Political Theory (1937). To update Sabine would be a formidable challenge for any student of political theory. It is unsurprising that no one has recently attempted to meet it. The instinctive modern academic response to such challenges is to try to cut them down to size by dividing the requisite labour. A simple and relatively expansive example would be The Cambridge History of Political Thought, of which two volumes have already appeared and at least three more are in preparation.

What is especially surprising about McClelland's approach under these circumstances is its comprehensive insouciance in the face of the range of often acrimonious academic quarrels about how it is or is not appropriate to define and interpret his subject matter. Not only could no prospective reader of this book hope to learn about the contours or sources of these quarrels, none, too, could hope to form a reasonably balanced view about which side it might be appropriate for them to take on any issue whatever. What McClelland fails to provide is intellectual guidance on any such question for anyone attempting to judge competently for themselves. A History of Western Political Thought may be an agreeable companion, but it is massively uninstructive about its titular subject matter.

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This is not because McClelland is incapable of providing instruction. He has read widely, if somewhat capriciously. He can think with vigour, and is an independent and agreeably sceptical political observer. What his book lacks is any clear educational purpose.

In teaching the history of political thought there is plenty to be said for eschewing politics as a consciously chosen vocation. There is at least something to be said, too, in the attempt to teach it, for viewing with suspicion the vision of science as a determinate and relatively self-directing vocation. But there is nothing to be said for teaching the history of political thought without any coherent and explicit purposes (except perhaps that it is still possible to get paid for doing so). Because political ideas with an unmistakably western provenance play such a prominent role in politics across the globe, the history of western political thought is an irretrievably uninnocent subject. In a postimperial and ever more peripheral country, we can be sure that the history of western political thought has all too many lessons for us.

It is far from clear as yet how the quarrels of the past few decades over methods of approach to the history of political thought bear on the intractable political dilemmas with which that history has always had to wrestle. The impulse to academicise the subject by turning it into a set of soluble problems of method is still offset by an equally powerful impulse to treat it as a domain on which to deploy and vindicate a set of personal political tastes. Neither approach is guaranteed to deepen political understanding. But neither is patently irrelevant to any such deepening. The resulting conversation has often been very much a dialogue of the deaf.

So far the key lessons pressed home have been more politically confusing than they have been illuminating. That history is a stern and exacting craft, and the past all but unknowably distant and extensive, is a salutary corrective to an unthinking and arrogant parochialism of the here and now. But it is no recipe for political comprehension in past, present or future. That politics is all-encompassing, bemusing, and endlessly and very personally implicating, is a good reason for supposing that historical scholarship alone, even of the utmost fastidiousness, can never hope to prove a reliable recipe for political insight. But it is, of course, political insight which those who place the history of western political thought on endless curricula and those who subject themselves to it must hope to derive from it. What academic exponents of the subject must seek to provide in response is a clear vindication of how their treatment can reasonably be expected to nurture such insight. That is a very tough question to answer. But it is not one which it is honourable simply to ignore.

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John Dunn is professor of political theory, 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ of Cambridge.