The History of Government by S.E. Finer, OUP, 3 vols, 1,710pp, £110 in UK
This is an epic book. Its subject, government from the very beginning of history until the present day, demands a breadth of knowledge not to be found in most universities, never mind most individuals. To undertake such a project demands great intellectual audacity. To begin such a project after retirement, as Samuel Finer did, could well be seen as crossing the line between audacity and delusion.
It must have been painful for the recently retired Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration at Oxford to have his request for funding turned down by the UK Social Science Research Council. They questioned the project's viability because of its "insufficient" selection of regimes. These criticisms on the grounds of intellectual coherence may well have been in addition to, or as a cover for, a suspicion that Finer was simply far too old to ever complete such a mammoth project. Finer was unperturbed by this vote of no-confidence from his peers. Neither was he deterred by a major heart attack. He managed to complete all but two of his planned thirty-six chapters before his death.
The book is both much less and much more than an encyclopaedic history of government throughout the ages. Only certain regimes are selected for analysis: those that were "historically great, archetypal, innovative" or a "vivid variant" of a more general category. This History is not history as written by political historians. Readers should look elsewhere for an account of the vicissitudes of the regimes examined by Finer. He concentrates on a detailed analysis of each political system at a given point in time at which he judges it to have been at its most interesting or most distinctive. He does so because his work is intended as an exercise in comparative analysis. Since Finer envisaged the book as a coherent whole rather than a reference work or a set of separate histories, he wanted it to be published in one volume. Despite attempts to shorten the text, The History of Government has been published in three volumes that are, even individually, enormous.
Not only the breadth but also the depth of Finer's scholarship is impressive. The great challenge of any exercise in comparative politics is to avoid the superficial treatment of individual cases while producing something that is more than a compendium of case histories. How does Finer tackle this challenge? He does not do so by advancing an "overarching theory". His more modest, but still ambitious, aim is to develop a consistent vocabulary for the description and comparison of different regimes. Finer rigorously defines key concepts such as feudalism, despotism, and the "modern state". This is where Finer is at his best. Aristotle, whose Politics was a very similar project to Finer's History, was known as the "master of definition". This work surely surpasses all others, including Aristotle's, when it comes to definitions in political science.
Finer very deliberately conceived his History as a comparative analysis. Therefore, it is ironic that the comparative sections seem to be squeezed into the narrow interstices between the formidable case-studies or take the form of mere asides or footnotes within those case-histories. This is also disappointing because it is in the comparison of regimes that the book releases the most intellectual energy.
An explanation for the dearth of comparative analysis may lie in the fact that throughout most of the work Finer is not confronted with a great problem which requires comparative analysis. One of the History's highlights is Finer's treatment of such a problem: the rise of the European "modern state" which has become the standard for the world. The first two-thirds of the history can seem a little disjointed as the story in the West is interrupted for an account of Chinese developments or vice versa. After 1500 Finer says that his "History begins to acquire a fugal quality . . . As in a fugue, first one polity comes in, then another, then comes the transposition of certain polities, then their blending together, until, in 1750, the world stands on the brink of becoming one single state-system". And this state-system came to be dominated by the West.
The originality of the rising western states lay firstly in their legalism. Their second unique characteristic was their extraordinary mutability. Finer attributes this to the fissile nature of European culture in the aftermath of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Lastly, the European states had themselves emerged in an intensely competitive state system. Contrasts between civilisations often result in fruitless assertion and counter-assertion and ad hominem mud-slinging. Finer did not set out with a set of concepts derived from the study of one area of the world and he had conducted in-depth studies of the great polities of both Europe and Asia. Thus, he is able easily to rise above the pettiness and superficiality that plagues many cross-civilisational studies.
Samuel Finer led a very distinguished academic career but none of his books became classics of the sort that can always be found in good bookshops and university reading lists. None, that is, until his "retirement project" - The History of Government. It is likely to be some time before anyone attempts to produce a rival to Finer's History. If somebody does attempt such a feat, it is unlikely it will be carried off with as much aplomb. Even more unlikely is that future historians of government will wait until their retirement to begin their work.
Iain McMenamin lectures in the Department of Politics, University College, Dublin