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This essay argues for the significance of visual sources in intellectual history, using a case study on the central importance of snuffboxes in eighteenth-century debates regarding politeness, commerce, virtue, and manners. It highlights the authors, artists and advertisers who celebrated snuff-taking in both verbal and visual texts as a positive symbol of elegance, sociability and the transformative effects of polite commerce. And it analyses the highly sophisticated texts of London satirists who challenged this practice as symbolising the corruption associated with luxury and commerce. Challenges to this practice, which involved some of the century’s most brilliant pens, from Sir John Vanburgh to William Hogarth and James Gillray, have been neglected by intellectual historians because of a tendency to treat visual sources as illustrations, rather than as significant contributions to political theory and debate. This essay argues that such an approach has resulted in an impoverished intellectual history and that images – and even snuffboxes themselves, used in highly articulated ritual performances of politeness and satirised in highly gendered terms – should be regarded as ‘texts’ and ‘idioms’ in the politics of politeness and patronage. It highlights Cambridge school contextualism as a method by which such texts may be read productively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual history is usually seen as essentially historical. It is – but it is also essentially philosophical, both when theorising intellectual history, which some intellectual historians do, and when interpreting texts, which all intellectual historians do. I demonstrate this symbiosis between history and philosophy via critical reflections on Martin Jay's recent book Genesis and Validity. Philosophical analysis, closely integrated with historical examples, suggests that we should significantly rethink Jay's theorisation of the relationship between genesis and validity (e.g. whether ideas from one context are valid in others). But the symbiosis between history and philosophy matters more when interpreting texts. Philosophical analysis is a powerful tool for recovering what authors meant, understanding how their ideas fit together, and seeing similarities and differences between ideas, as I show with examples from Quentin Skinner's interpretations of Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. Yet even Jay and Skinner – two of the world's most philosophically astute intellectual historians – overlook the crucial symbiosis between history and philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the synthesis of theoretical as well as practical aspects of entrepreneurship following the representatives of the economic theories of the Cambridge School, Institutionalism and the Chicago School. Based on secondary sources the article aims to provide a theoretical perspective on the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship by utilizing the knowledge of selected economic theories and at the same time finding empirical evidence in economic practice for which the features of the examined economic theories are typical. The article builds on previous work in this field that explore the articles for from the pre-history of economic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1992, John Dunn published an essay in Italian (which came out in English only years later) in which he summarized and clarified certain aspects of his historiographical vision concerning the history of political theory. A careful analysis of the text – corroborated by a consideration of later comments as well as general historical-theoretical references – gives us an insight into the lights and shadows of his thought. This reinterpretation reveals the originality of a perspective that examined the meaning of 'canon' within the history of political theory, and indicated certain cultural and political aims to be consciously pursued through it. This original thought has recently been consolidated by other considerations on the need for a global history of political thought capable of offering interesting food for thought. Nevertheless, these seem to have emerged from a change of opinion on Dunn's part, focusing to a greater extent on certain (more or less well-defined) moral duties that should be pursued by scholars of the history of political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines different intellectual-historical approaches to the work of Georg Lukács, arguing that a methodology similar to that of the Cambridge School is, curiously, that most in line with Lukács's own approach. I begin with some general methodological comments on intellectual history, before showing that a proper appreciation of the discourses within which Lukács was situated is essential to understanding both the specifics and the overall project of History and Class Consciousness. Finally, I argue that situating thinkers like Lukács properly within their time does not reduce them to museum pieces; rather, by seeking to capture the alterity of the past without reducing it to familiarity, we may de-reify our own world-views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent articles critical of the use of context in contextual intellectual history have identified contextual method with the post‐1960s work of the "Cambridge School," which is regarded as being grounded in a flawed theory of textual interpretation. Focusing on German cultural and political history, this article shows that a contextual historiography was already fully developed in seventeenth‐century ecclesiastical history, and a parallel version of this approach had developed in the field of constitutional history. The modern critique of context emerged only with the appearance of dialectical philosophical history in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The article argues that rather than representing a scholarly engagement with contextual historiography, the central plank of the dialectical critique of contextualism—the notion that contextual explication of thought is insufficient because context itself has transcendental conditions—is actually a cultural‐political attack on it launched on behalf of a hostile and incommensurable academic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes shape as a review of a review: Rosario Lopez's admirable 'The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual History', itself a review of Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, Global Intellectual History. Lopez proposes that 'the quest for the global' entails a critique if not an abandonment of the concept of 'context.' The attack upon context entails questions about both 'political thought' (or 'theory') and 'intellectual history' (if not 'history' itself). This is because, as Lopez, Moyn and Sartori apparently agree, it extends as far as an attack on the notion of context as formed in spatial-temporal frameworks. The beginnings of the 'global' critique are well known and may as well be accepted as common ground. They reduce to the assertion that 'Cambridge' scholarship in this field is 'Eurocentric'; that is, that it has dealt exclusively with the 'political thought' generated in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, transmitted to medieval and modern Europe, and taken up in the Euro-colonized Americas and a world (or 'globe') subjected to European or 'western' domination. This is obviously true, and calls for reformation. We recognize, but are not afraid to accept, that 'political thought' in a society distant from the European may be different in deep-seated ways from that we have learned to study, and that the meanings of the basic terms we shall apply to learning it may require restatement so drastic that we will find it hard to comprehend them. At this point the authority by which we ascribe meaning to both 'their' terms as we learn them, and to 'ours' as we employ them in seeking to understand 'them,' will require investigation and defence; on what disciplines of enquiry does it rest? But at this point the meaning of 'global' is no more than 'multicultural,' the transition from one 'context' to another; and we already know from Lopez that the 'global turn' may require us to go much further than that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a reinterpretation of the origins and character of the so-called 'Cambridge School' in the history of political thought by reconstructing the intellectual background to J.G.A. Pocock's 1962 essay 'The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry', typically regarded as the first statement of a 'Cambridge' approach. I argue that neither linguistic philosophy nor the celebrated work of Peter Laslett exerted a major influence on Pocock's work between 1948 and 1962. Instead, I emphasise the importance of Pocock's interest in the history of historiography and of his doctoral supervisor, Herbert Butterfield. By placing Pocock's intellectual development in these contexts, I suggest, the autonomy of diverse versions of the 'Cambridge' approach can more readily be perceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an expectation today that International Relations (IR) theory ought to engage with philosophy as a meta-knowledge capable of grounding and legitimizing knowledge claims in the discipline. Two assumptions seem to lie behind this expectation: first, that only philosophy can supply the necessary meta-theoretical grounding needed; second, that theory is inherently a philosophical register of knowledge. This article treats these assumptions with scepticism. While not denying philosophy's contribution to IR theory, the article makes the case for contextual intellectual history as an alternative mode of political and international theory. It seeks to shed light on the 'philosophization of IR' by depicting the broad contours of the historical and continuing rivalry between philosophy and history in the humanities and social sciences and, by reference to Machiavelli and Renaissance humanism, reminding the discipline of IR of the value of studying politics and international relations in a historical mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between political theory, including the history of political thought, and International Relations theory, including the history of international thought, has been, and to some extent remains, complex and troubled. On both sides of the Atlantic, the mid-twentieth century founders of International Relations as an academic discipline drew extensively on the canon of political thought, but approached the subject in an uncritical way, while political philosophers largely disdained the international as a focus. This changed in the 1970s and 1980s, with the emergence of the 'justice industry' based on critiques of Rawls' A Theory of Justice and a consequent recovering of the past history of cosmopolitan and communitarian thought. A new discourse emerged in this period - International Political Theory - bridging the gap between political thought and international relations and stimulating a far more creative and scholarly approach to the history of international thought. However, in a social science environment dominated by the methods of economics, that is, formal theory and quantification, the new discourse of International Political Theory occupies a niche rather than existing at the centre of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Pocock gave “A method, a model and Machiavelli” as a talk at Princeton University in 1968. What happened to the text afterwards is uncertain, but it remained in the papers of Professor Donald Weinstein until his death in 2015, when it was identified by his widow Beverly Parker as being of importance. The text is especially revealing about Pocock’s attitudes to the history of ideas/intellectual history in the late 1960s and more especially the state of the grand project that became The Machiavellian Moment some years later. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I am grateful for J. G. A. Pocock's generous response to my article on his early work and the development of the 'Cambridge School'. In this brief rejoinder, I try to make clear that I meant in no way to diminish the importance of Pocock's achievement, or its centrality to the 'Cambridge School' story, while defending my view of the distinctive character and intellectual genealogy of his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Reply, I argue that pace Knud Haakonssen it is dubious that Adam Smith managed to 'blow up' Hugo Grotius's universalist system of natural jurisprudence. Rather, Smith emerges as a closet rationalist who put forward crypto-normative universalist claims himself and found that he could not in the end improve upon Grotius's system. Grotius was not seen by Smith as a 'casuist' tout court. I try to give an explanation for the tensions introduced into Smith's work by his incorporation of key aspects of Grotius's theory of justice. Furthermore, I try to clarify in what regard Grotius should be seen as a novel and original thinker. Lastly, I argue in favor of according ideas and arguments their own weight, against a facile contextualism that is always in danger of falling prey to the genealogical fallacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Though the fourteen contributors to this volume bring varied perspectives on method, most striking is their common engagement with contextualist approaches. While some of the essays advocate a temporally and spatially extended, renewed history of ideas with debts to Arthur Lovejoy, and are critical of excessive contextualization, several either defend contextualism, or the culture concept, or offer a more robust materialist foundation for the history of thought and culture. This review focuses on the logic and metaphors used to criticize contextual methods and highlights problems with both the new history of ideas and the new materialist gestures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines is a much better account of esotericism than anything that Leo Strauss wrote. But although Melzer uncovers many examples of writers who make claims about other writers' esotericism, he provides fewer examples of actual esotericism than he thinks, and his evidence is sometimes tenuous. More important, perhaps, is Melzer's valuable evidence about particular esoteric techniques. But there are some curious silences here: he does not support Strauss' claims that esoteric writers used the techniques of numbers and density. How much of Strauss' esoteric interpretation rests on alleged techniques for which there is no historical basis? And Melzer's evidence about the alleged technique of centers involves a misreading of Cicero. I also raise questions about Melzer's distinctions between esoteric and non-esoteric, and between esoteric and literal. Moreover, his treatment of Strauss' critics sidesteps their key objections—objections that remain unanswered. Despite these problems, Melzer's analysis of esotericism is a great advance on Strauss' analysis: this book is a major contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a revisionist history of international relations theory has generated a complex and nuanced picture of classical realism. In doing so, it has also contributed, more often than not, to a normative rehabilitation of realism. Disciplinary historians, however, have been remarkably silent about the causes of their collective bias. This article explores the paradox of a disciplinary history that has often mobilized ‘anti-whig’ arguments in its battle against the potted history of ‘great debates,’ yet only to pursue a not-so-covert presentist agenda. It argues that the revisionist history of international relations is itself part of the realist tradition, and that from its early formulation by Herbert Butterfield to its current deployment in disciplinary history, the anti-whig argument has seamlessly woven together a vision of history and a Christian-realist vision of politics. I suggest that the entanglement between realism and the historicist rejection of rationalist philosophies of history has the potential of fundamentally renewing our understanding of realism. By the same token, recovering the elective affinities between realism and historicism casts under a new light current debates about the relationship between realism and the Enlightenment since it suggests that realism was essentially a form of counter-Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will describe the critical reception of Fisher's book by the Cambrige authors. First, we will begin with a description of the relationship between Fisher (1911) and the British Monetary Orthodoxy. Next, we shall examine the relationship between Fisher (1911) and the Cambridge School and Hawtrey. This will lead into a study of Keynes’ comments on Fisher (1911). We shall show that all referred positively to Fisher. However, they were also critical of Fisher's method and this was to contribute, in turn, to making their own analyses more precise, in particular regarding the role of credit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the great intellectual productions of the postwar period, J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was also an intervention in the American polity of the 1970s. The book's content, its rhetorical style, its methodology, and even its physical printed form were all designed to effectuate a political gesture. The crises of 1968 to 1973 invalidated the optimistic liberalism of Pocock's academic circle. The history of political language offered a refuge and a programmatic foundation for Pocock's pragmatic conservatism. The Machiavellian Moment was designed to reinforce the weight of tradition in contemporary political debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this essay examines the peculiar role European intellectual history played in coming to terms with the twentieth century as an ‘Age of Extremes’ and the different weight it was given for that task at different times and in different national contexts up to the 1970s. The second part looks at the contemporary history of politically focused intellectual history — and the possible impact of the latter on the writing of contemporary history in general: it will be asked how the three great innovative movements in the history of political thought which emerged in the last fifty years have related to the practice of contemporary history: the German school of conceptual history, the ‘Cambridge School’, and the ‘linguistic turn’. The third part focuses on recent trends to understand processes of liberalization — as opposed to the older search for causes of political extremism. It is also in the third part that the so far rather Euro-centric perspective is left behind, as attempts to create an intellectual history of the more or less new enemies of the West are examined. Finally, the author pleads for a contemporary intellectual history that seeks novel ways of understanding the twentieth century and the ‘newest history’ since 1989 by combining tools from conceptual history and the Cambridge School. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Cambridge School has been remarkably successful in its attempt to grasp the character of political thought in the early modern period on the basis of historical data, rather than quasi-philosophical speculations. At the same time, it is questionable whether its research approach is suited to the study of later political thought. Still, the article argues, these difficulties are not insurmountable, and the Cambridge School can indeed serve as a model for historians of modern political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his histories of political discourse, Pocock has construed political economy as a prime site for hostile responses to the dilapidating effects of commerce on the virtue of citizens. In this paper, I dispute two aspects of Pocock''s treatment of this terrain. The first is the criteria he uses to identify the constitution of political economy, which are vague and make no reference to the emergence of ‘the economy’ as a sphere distinct from the state. The second, and closely related complaint, is that by conscripting earlier writings on trade as anticipations of political economy their historical specificity is effaced, resulting in anachronism of the very kind Pocock has typically tried to correct. I conclude by drawing out some general implications for the historiography of political economy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Foucault and Skinner have each offered influential accounts of the emergence of the state as a defining element of modern political thought. Yet the two accounts have never been brought into dialogue; this nonencounter is made more interesting by the fact that Foucault's and Skinner's accounts are at odds with one another. There is therefore much to be gained by examining this divergence. In this article I attempt this task by first setting out the two accounts of the state, and then some of the methodological strictures each thinker has suggested. I argue that the divergence between Foucault's and Skinner's accounts of the state is indeed driven by differences in method, as we might expect; but I also argue that these differences in method can themselves be well explained by the differing political motivations each thinker has at times articulated. Thus it is possible to make politics, and not method, the privileged point of this reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender differences in educational attainment have generated considerable debate. Unfortunately, this debate has been constructed in terms of either the measurement of change in the size of the gender gap over time or attempts to theorise such change. This scholarly divide reflects the commitment of researchers to particular methodological paradigms. Therefore, this paper draws on part of a longitudinal, mixed-methods study conducted in three Sixth Forms in England to examine both the extent and causes of gender differences in attainment. Initially, a questionnaire was completed by 330 students in the Sixth Forms and, subsequently, in-depth interviews, nonparticipant observation and a vignette were used to explore students' educational experiences. The public examination grades students held on entering and leaving the Sixth Form were analysed to establish gender differences in attainment. At the start of students' studies, the size of the gender gap in attainment was found to be relatively modest and this gap narrowed further on completion of the course. The declining relevance of gender to attainment was explicable in terms of students' growing awareness of gender, the convergence of their educational practices and changing patterns of social interaction. Nevertheless, gender became more relevant to attainment the closer issues of occupational inequality were approached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper retraces some of the stages in Sraffa's thinking about the work of Marshall, by drawing on unpublished material in the Sraffa archive from 1923 to 1930. It argues that Sraffa transformed his dissent – which was based on ideological grounds – into a ‘quest for the fatal error’ to demolish the logical construction of Marshallian theory. Some of his attacks were successful (for example, the critique of the relation between costs and output); other attempts failed (the critique of the ‘normal rate of profit’ and the critique of the concept of marginal productivity) since Sraffa could not find enough textual evidence to support his position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-Keynesian theory was developed as an alternative to mainstream neoclassical economics. However, post-Keynesians have not succeeded in getting their message through, partly because of the difficult and controversial economic issues upon which they embarked, partly because they emphasized, both in their monetary and growth analysis, theories that do not radically depart from the mainstream of economics. This paper therefore argues that post-Keynesian economics got off on the wrong foot. Rather than having emphasized the works of Minsky and (the early) Kaldor in money, post-Keynesians should have considered the contributions of Robinson and Kahn. Also, rather than having emphasized the work of Robinson and Harrod on growth, they ought to have given greater emphasis to Kaldor's demand-oriented growth theory. Hence, as a simplification, post-Keynesians should have considered Robinson on money, not Kaldor; and Kaldor on growth, not Robinson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]