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¹¹ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:89.

¹² When interpreting these authors, my own approach will be presentist rather than historical. While this could be criticized as viciously circular or lauded as admirably consistent, I take it mostly as proof that the sort of ethical choices I am describing are unavoidable, even in an essay about these very choices.

¹³ Skinner, , “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁵ See, among many others, Bevir, Mark, “Are There Any Perennial Problems in Political Theory?,” Political Studies 42 (1994): 662–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lamb, Robert, “Quentin Skinner's Revised Historical Contextualism: A Critique,” History of the Human Sciences 22 (2009): 51–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Paul Kelly, “Rescuing Political Theory from the Tyranny of History,” in Floyd and Stears, Political Philosophy versus History?, 13–37.

¹⁶ Hirsch, E. D., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967)Google Scholar and Hirsch, , The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Hirsch's terminology is unfortunately misleading, since his concept of “significance” seems like a better candidate for what is colloquially meant by “meaning” (i.e., “what this means to us”) than what he calls “meaning.” For a subtler analysis of the multiple meanings of “meaning,” see Martinich, Aloysius, “Four Senses of ‘Meaning’ in the History of Ideas: Quentin Skinner's Theory of Historical Interpretation,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 3 (2009): 225–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Furthermore, if Paul Ricoeur is correct that every text contains a surplus of meaning, then there are far more ways of understanding a text than just the two described by Hirsch; see Ricoeur, , Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. Thompson, John B. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:87.

¹⁸ Skinner, , “A Reply to My Critics,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. Tully, James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 256Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:52–53.

²⁰ See McFate, Sean, The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

²¹ Dworkin, Ronald, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 99–190Google Scholar.

²² Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation, 7.

²³ Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. and trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation, 90.

²⁵ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:65.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Many of the most important contributions to this literature are collected in Fischer, John Martin, ed. The Metaphysics of Death, Stanford Series in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. For an application of these ideas to research ethics specifically, see Wilkinson, T. M., “Last Rights: The Ethics of Research on the Dead,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 19 (2002): 31–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁹ See Partridge, Ernest, “Posthumous Interests and Posthumous Respect,” Ethics 91 (1981): 243–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Taylor, James Stacey, Death, Poshumous Harm, and Bioethics (New York: Routledge, 2012), 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³¹ On the former point, see Kelly, “Rescuing Political Theory,” 26 and Lamb, “Quentin Skinner's Revised Historical Contextualism,” 57–58. On the latter, see Green, “On the Difference between a Pupil and a Historian of Ideas,” 107–8.

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³⁵ In ibid., 107–11.

³⁶ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:53

³⁷ Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. Gerth, H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946)Google Scholar.

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³⁹ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:182.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 170–71.

⁴¹ That said, there are many within the discipline of history who have made precisely this attempt. For an influential defense of “dialogical history” along these lines, see LaCapra, Dominick, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. It is important to note that many who self-identify as historians, or are employed as such, would nonetheless qualify as presentists according to the schema of ideal types used in this essay.

⁴² This paragraph draws on ideas first published in my review of J. G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, November 6, 2009. Available online at https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/political-thought-and-history-essays-on-theory-and-method/.

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⁴⁵ Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1903), viiiGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁸ Elton, G. R., The Practice of History (London: Fontana, 1969)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ See Davison, Scott A., On the Intrinsic Value of Everything (New York: Continuum, 2012)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:15–21.

⁵¹ Southgate, Beverly, What Is History For? (New York: Routledge, 2005), 76Google Scholar.

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⁵⁴ See Frazer, Michael L., “Utopophobia as a Vocation: The Professional Ethics of Ideal and Nonideal Political Theory,” Social Philosophy and Policy 33 (2016): 175–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which begins with the same passage from Cicero discussed here.

⁵⁵ This is not to say that all—or even most—political theory succeeds in advancing the cause of justice. The majority of it probably has no effect on real politics at all, while some of it (as will be discussed later) may actually prove deleterious. That said, activities often fail to achieve their goals, and we can separate our judgment of the value of an aim from the success of any given effort to attain it.

⁵⁶ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:6.

⁵⁷ Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 75–77. It is important to note that, contrary to popular belief, Skinner has never actually been an antiquarian, at least not in Nietzsche's sense. Antiquarians, Nietzsche says, piously preserve, and hence kill and mummify, the treasures of the past. See ibid., 72–75.

⁵⁸ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:88.

⁵⁹ Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 76.

⁶⁰ Skinner, Visions of Politics, 1:88.

⁶¹ Mill, John Stuart, “Bentham,” in Utilitarianism and On Liberty: Including Essay on Bentham and Selections from the Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, ed. Warnock, Mary (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 64Google Scholar.

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⁶³ Janaway, Christopher and Alexander, Peter, “History of Philosophy: The Analytical Ideal,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 62 (1988): 182Google Scholar. Melissa Lane agrees, writing that “the history of some ideas will teach contingency, while the history of other ideas will teach continuity, and if that were not so then the piecemeal emergence of the present from the past could not have been possible, as it was”; Lane, “Why History of Ideas at All?,” History of European Ideas 28 (2002): 39Google Scholar. See also Lane, “Constraint, Freedom and Exemplar: History and Theory without Teleology,” in Floyd and Stears, Political Philosophy versus History?, 128–50; Lawson, Stephanie, “Political Studies and the Contextual Turn: A Methodological/Normative Critique,” Political Studies 56 (2008): 592CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the introduction and titular essay in King, Preston, Thinking Past a Problem: Essays on the History of Ideas (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000)Google Scholar.

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⁶⁵ “Quentin Skinner on Meaning and Method,” interview by Teresa Bejan, The Art of Theory, 2011. Online at http://www.artoftheory.com/quentin-skinner-on-meaning-and-method/.

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⁶⁹ Van Gelderen, Martin and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

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⁷⁶ Skinner, Quentin, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy, no. 162 (2009): 325–70Google Scholar. I owe the observation of the explicit prescriptivism of this conclusion, and its tension with what Skinner says in the introduction to the piece, to Lane, “Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves,” 81–82.

⁷⁷ Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 71.

⁷⁸ Dunn, “The Identity of the History of Ideas,” 98.

⁷⁹ Green, “On the Difference between a Pupil and a Historian of Ideas.” For a similar argument against a rigid division of intellectual labor, see Leslie, Margaret, “In Defense of Anachronism,” Political Studies 18 (1970): 441–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸² Shapiro, Ian, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁸³ This is the thesis of Frazer, “Utopophobia as a Vocation,” where I argue that political theorists have a professional responsibility to offer a valuable service to their fellow citizens and must not get lost in the construction of useless utopias.