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Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner's Foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

K. R. Minogue
K. R. Minogue
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Extract

Quentin Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought is primarily of interest to philosophers not for its excellent account of European thought about the state but for the self–conscious philosophy which has gone into it. It is a rare historian who pauses to get his philosophy in order before he embarks on a major enterprise, though such a policy is possibly less unusual in intellectual history than in other fields. In Skinner's case, however, this order of doing things has been pushed so far that he counts as a philosopher in his own right, rather than as merely someone who is unusually careful to think about what he is doing. The publication of this major work thus provides a convenient opportunity to make a few remarks about the relation between historical theory and practice.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 56 , Issue 218 , October 1981 , pp. 533 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1981

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References

1 Cambridge, 1979. Two volumes. One: The Renaissance; Two: The Reformation. Henceforth referred to as Foundations.

2 Ibid., Vol. I, x.

3 Hollis, Martin and Skinner, Quentin, ‘Action and Context’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 52 (1978), 69Google Scholar. Henceforth referred to as ‘Action and Context’.

4 Foundations, Vol. I, Preface, xi.

5 At its most extreme, the claim plays round with the notion that the correct method is not only necessary but also sufficient. ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, Political Theory II, No. 3 (August 1974), 279. Henceforth referred to as ‘Some Problems…’

6 Vol. I, xiv.

7 Vol. I, xv.

8 History and Theory, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (1969). Henceforth referred to as ‘Meaning and Understanding…’

9 See, for example, Howard Warrender, ‘Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Mr. Skinner on Hobbes’, paper presented to the 1979 Political Studies Association Conference held at Sheffield.

10 Man and Society: A Critical Examination of Some Important Social and Political Theories from Machiavelli to Marx, 2 vols (London, 1963), ix.

11 ‘Meaning and Understanding…’, 52.

12 An enthusiasm later ‘mildly regretted’: ‘Some Problems…’, 279.

13 ‘Meaning and Understanding’, 29; referring to Dahl, Robert A., Modern Political Analysis (New Jersey, 1963), 113Google Scholar.

14 ‘Meaning and Understanding’, 29; referring to ‘Locke's Doctrine of Signs’, Journal of the History of Ideas No. 26 (1965), 382.

15 I refer to such works as Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961)Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943)Google Scholar and Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar. There are, of course, many other such works.

16 See the review by Hopfl, Harro in Philosophical Books 21 (01 1980)Google Scholar.

17 ‘Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in Aylmer, G. E., The Interregnum (London, 1972), 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Ibid.

19 De Cive, The Preface to the Reader, Sterling Lamprecht (ed.) (New York, 1949), 16–17: ‘monarchy is the most commodious government (which one thing alone I confess in this whole book not to be demonstrated, but only probably stated)…’

20 ‘Meaning and Understanding’, 53.

21 The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), 28.

22 ‘Some Problems…’, 281.

23 On p. 283 of ‘Some Problems…’ where we learn that ‘the key to excluding unhistorical meanings must lie in limiting our range of descriptions of any given text to those which the author himself might in principle have avowed, and that the key to understanding the actual historical meaning of a text must lie in recovering the complex intentions of the author who wrote it’. This goes further than Butterfield, but is essentially the same point.

24 ‘Some Problems…’, 286.

25 Ibid., 281, where the impossibility of discovering ‘the full picture’ is recognized.

26 Plamenatz, 1963, x.

27 The thing about Locke's Second Treatise is that it won't keep still. Once thought to be written in 1689, it was transferred by Peter Laslett to 1679. More recently, however, it has been argued that the work really belongs to 1683 and the milieu of the Rye House Plot, in which this abstract style of argument was much more common. See Richard Ashcraft in Political Theory, November 1980.

28 ‘Intention and Convention in Speech Acts’, Philosophical Review (October 1964), 439. Strawson's remark that ‘It would equally be a mistake…to generalize the account of illocutionary force derived from Grice's analysis; for this would involve holding, falsely, that the complex overt intention manifested in any illocutionary act always includes the intention to secure a certain definite response or reaction in an audience over and above that which is necessarily secured if the illocutionary force of the utterance is understood’ (p. 459) is a useful warning of how too much conceptualization might tempt the historian, if he gets it wrong, into searching for intentions to secure responses that don't exist.

29 ‘Action and Context’, 69.

30 ‘Meaning and Understanding’, 47.

31 Ibid., 16.

32 Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1928), 456.

33 Foundations, Vol. I, Preface, ix.

34 Ibid., Vol. II, 349 (italics supplied).

35 ‘Meaning and Understanding’, 22.

36 Even more vulnerable to criticism along these lines would be such a judgment as that Jean Bodin's Colloquium of the Seven was ‘perhaps the most emancipated discussion of religious liberty produced in France in the course of the religious wars’. Ibid., Vol. II, 246 (italics supplied).

37 See, for example, ‘The Historiography of Ideas’ in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1948).

38 See The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York, 1936).

39 See Politics, Language and Time (London: Methuen, 1972).

40 ‘On the Theory of Objective Mind’ in Objective Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 178. It is interesting to observe that, for at least some cases, Popper's analysis in terms of three worlds (the material, psychological and intellectual) corresponds precisely to Austin's analysis of the perlocutionary, illocutionary and locutionary acts involved in speech.

41 See Wood, Ellen Meiskins and Wood, Neal, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Social Context (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar.

42 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar.

43 ‘Some Problems…’, 280.

44 ‘Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts’, New Literary History, III, No. 2 (Winter 1972), 406 (italics in text).

45 ‘Some Problems…’, 280.

46 Foundations, II, 114.

47 Foundations, II, 89.

48 Foundations, II, 253.

49 ‘Hermeneutics and the Role of History’, New Literary History, 7 (Autumn 1975), 210.

50 Ibid., 211.

51 Ibid., 211.

52 ‘Some Problems…’, 287.

53 ‘Meaning and Understanding’, 53.

54 ‘Action and Context’, 43.

55 The Listener (15 March 1979).

56 ‘Action and Context’, 68.

57 ‘Some Problems…’, op. cit., 287.

58 Foundations, Vol. I, xiii.

59 Perhaps Professor Skinner has identified with Peachum, the hero of Peter de Vries's recent novel Consenting Adults, or the Duchess will be Furious: ‘When they brought the news to me that another bunch at Oxford had scrapped Causality, I stretched out with an iceberg on my head. Then it was all random. Certainty was a gone goose, and the soul with it.…’