Political Development and Political Thought

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231193425
• Author: Philip Petrov
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 76–88

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231193425

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Political Development and Political

Thought

Philip Petrov

1



Abstract

This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to

offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay proposes that un-

derstanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a parti cular sense of that

term) can benef‌it contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists’normative prescriptions. Early modern

political theorists faced signif‌icant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still

struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing

material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the de-

veloped and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to

underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby mis-

reading some of the latter’s normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who

faced institutional constraints that have signif‌icantly receded in today’s West, contemporary readers can enrich their

understanding of these writers’objectives.

Keywords

democratization, economic development, political development, political realism, political theory, state-building

Introduction

Early modern European political theorists lived in envi-

ronments that resembled what many researchers now call

“developing countries,”which were substantially harsher

1

places than are contemporary developed countries (the

latter did not exist until at least the nineteenth century).

These writers faced signif‌icant risk of large-scale vio-

lence, political instability, and state repression in polities

that still struggled to accomplish goals such as im-

plementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and

widely distributing material resources using impartial

criteria. This essay applies existing research in new in-

stitutional economics to early modern political theory so

as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes (1588–

1679), Hume (1711–76), and James Madison (1751–

1836) as examples, the essay proposes that understanding

early modern political theorists as inhabitants of devel-

oping countries (in a particular sense of that term) can

benef‌it contemporary readers in interpreting some of these

theorists’normative prescriptions. Many contemporary

readers of early modern political theory live in today’s

liberal-democratic West. They are thus able to take for

granted a (by historical standards) high level of political-

economic development. As a consequence, given garden-

variety psychological processes of adaptation, contem-

porary readers are liable to normalize this level of de-

velopment and to overlook that early modern political

theorists could not enjoy it.

2

Reading early modern po-

litical theorists as inhabitants of developing countries

can—this essay aims to show—off-set this tendency.

Strictly speaking, projecting the largely post-1945 (see,

e.g., Arndt 1981) language of development backward in

time is anachronistic. However, this language is a useful

shorthand for denoting several of the institutional design

problems with which early modern political theorists were

concerned, and this essay unabashedly uses it in this way.

1

University of Chicago Law School, Chicago, IL, USA (beginning

September 2023)

Corresponding Author:

Philip Petrov, University of Chicago Law School, 1111 East 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

Email: petrovp@uchicago.edu