The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (120 page)

In Greek a
hermeneus
was an interpreter and the word probably originates from the name of Hermes, messenger of the gods and the eloquence. In all its nineteenth-century uses and definitions hermeneutics was agreed to be the art and science of interpretation, primarily, though not exclusively, of religious texts. A more specific implication was that hermeneutics was concerned with real and hidden meanings, quite different from the elucidation and concern with practical application which was the concern of
exegesis
.
In the twentieth century, hermeneutics has become one of many terms to shift from a primarily religious context into secular social theory. The principal individual responsible for this transition was probably
Heidegger
. In the study of political theory, hermeneutics has become principally associated with the ‘Cambridge School’ which includes such writers as Quentin Skinner and John Dunn . For hermeneutical scholars the interesting questions about, say, John Locke would not be whether he offers us a coherent set of prescriptions for when we should obey government, but what meaning the text has when it is put in its social context, and we fully understand what Locke understood (for example) by property and by ‘servants’.
Up to a point hermeneutics can be treated simply as a different discipline, with different emphases from the kind of exegesis that looks at a text and asks, ‘Irrespective of its context, what can this tell us now?’ But certain practitioners of hermeneutics stand to be accused of abandoning any possibility of persistent or resoluble argument and treating the kind of meaning that comes from particular contexts and the interests within them as the only form of meaning.
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The concept that social structures derive from economic structures, and these structures are changed through class struggles, each ruling class producing another class that will eventually supersede it. A Marxist doctrine, which supposes that human history develops as the result of contradictions, mainly among social classes. The material element of the theory consists in the assertion, first, that human history is a form of more general natural development and, second, that the principal determinant of social organization is the manner in which people reproduce their lives. Thus, at the stage of ‘primitive communism’ humans found it necessary to work in common to survive, and class formation was absent. However, slave society emerged with the accumulation of surplus products and weaponry in the possession of a military caste. Feudal relations were characterized by the military protection of serfs in return for a proportion of their surplus agricultural product. Capitalism, in turn, was characterized by the emergence of a bourgeois class, using free labourers (proletarians) to operate machine technology to produce an even greater surplus product. Within each of these ‘modes of production’, at a certain point the existing class relations begin to act as a constraint on the further development of the material forces of production and revolutions occur. On this basis, socialism was expected to succeed capitalism under which private control of the material forces was increasingly at odds with their real potential.
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Doctrine that historical events are governed by natural laws, which in turn determine social and cultural developments, beliefs and values specific to each period of history.
As a translation of the German
Historismus
, historicism in social philosophy originally meant an insistence of ‘getting inside’ a historical period in order to understand it, by learning the meaning of the language and concepts used in that period. However, since the publication of (Sir) Karl Popper's
The Poverty of Historicism
in 1957 the most generally recognized sense of the word has been entirely different: a belief in the unavoidable necessity of historical development following a certain path. Marx and
Marxism
provide the most obvious examples of historicists, in this sense, but many others, including Oswald Spengler,
Hegel
and
Comte
, qualify in different ways. Popper criticized historicism not merely as wrong, but as conducive to an ideological, potentially totalitarian outlook which encourages those who believe themselves to be ‘on the side of history’ to show contempt for alternative points of view and those who hold them. The range of historicist doctrine is, perhaps, wider than Popper suggests. The Whig view of history, identified by Sir Herbert Butterfield as a belief in the necessity of the ultimate triumph of progress over reaction, is certainly historicist. So are many ‘liberal’ views, including Adam
Smith's
account of historical development as culminating in the establishment of a commercial society. A more recent version of this thesis is Francis Fukuyama's
The End of History and the Last Man
(1992).
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(1889–1945)
See
national socialism
.

 
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(1890–1969)
Vietnamese revolutionary and politician. Leader of the Indo-Chinese Communist Party, and the League for the Independence of Vietnam. Gains a place in this dictionary more for the idealized vision of him held by many followers of the
New Left
in the West in the 1960s than for his actual contribution to political institutions or theory. As his regime was successfully opposing the United States, and as the United States was the fount of all that was evil, Ho became the symbol of all that was good.

 
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