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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 his...

Republicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history; however, it remains conspicuously undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. While recent historiography has challenged representations of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin as a mindlessly destructive, anti-democratic force, the extent of ideological and rhetorical continuity linking the Provisional Government formed to assume control of the Free State on 7 January 1922 with the pre-Treaty republican tradition has not been understood. This article rejects the historiographical thesis that the Provisional Government abandoned republican ideas. Drawing from the Cambridge School's contextualist account of republicanism as a polysemic and contingent political language, it highlights the vigorously contested nature of republican thought in the intellectual firmament of revolutionary Sinn Féin and argues that the Free State leadership articulated its vision of politics and society through classical republican concepts of ‘civic virtue’ and the ‘common good’. It is suggested additionally that the colonial dynamics of the Anglo-Irish relationship helped to shape the vision of republican citizenship promoted by an administration possessed of a deep-seated determination to refute historical perceptions of the Irish people as congenitally ‘unfit’ for sovereignty.

Trainees were encouraged to tell a mythological story to the class, lasting about ten minutes. They could use props and other visual aids if they wished, but the emphasis was for them to practise speaking before the class, using prompt cards if necessary, and employing all the techniques of a professional oral ‘poet’ – such as gesture, eye contact, tone of voice and so on. There is obviously considerable general interest among younger students about mythology. Locally, interest is captured by the Cambridge School Classics project which puts on an annual Ovid Mythology competition and the website War with Troy is used by several of the schools where trainees are placed. Its use as a stimulus for learning has been well-documented by its author and past PGCE subject lecturer Bob Lister (2005, 2007) and by Walker (2018), a former teacher trainee from the faculty. Some of the Latin textbooks such as Minimus (Bell, 1999) and Suburani (Hands-Up Education, 2020) contain myth episodes and are familiar to the teacher trainees. The GCSE and A Level qualifications often contain mythological subject matter. Khan-Evans (2018) has shown how older students of Classics have retained deep-rooted affection for mythological stories in their earlier schooldays. Research into the power of mythological storytelling as a stimulus for learning, creative arts and even therapy is current, as the Our Mythical Childhood project (2020) has demonstrated. A book of the project's work is eagerly anticipated next year. The recent Troy exhibition at the British Museum has also awoken considerable interest.

This article considers the relationship between the uses and forms of history within international law and questions of method in the development of histories of international law. It focuses on the advantages of genealogy as an approach to the history of international law given its capacity to both explain the way in which the law itself makes use of the past and intervene in this.Elaborating on the compatibility between genealogy and elements of the contextual approach to history associated with the ‘Cambridge School’, this article challenges recent suggestions that anachronism is irrelevant, unavoidable, or even a ‘method’ that might be fruitfully embraced in studies of international law’s past directed towards explaining and potentially altering its present. It argues that historians of international law should take the dangers of anachronism seriously, particularly if the histories they develop are to operate as a form of critique and basis for change. Genealogy is a form of history that allows a particularly potent critique of international legal thought and practice. It opens up possibilities for more radical change by questioning and moving beyond the normative framework that usually structures (and limits) calls for reform in international law.

The ‘twin deficits hypothesis’ (TDH) claims that there is a connection between fiscal and current account deficits. In its most extreme form, popularized by the ‘New Cambridge School’ in the 1970s, the argument was that, with equilibrium in the private sector, the size of the public sector deficit was proportional to, and the principal determinant of the size of the current account deficit. In softer versions, private sector equilibrium is not assumed, but it is still argued that changes in the size of the fiscal deficit result in broadly equivalent changes in the current account. If valid, the TDH has important policy implications. In this paper we critically review the theoretical rationale for the TDH. We go on to examine the empirical evidence relating to it. We find little consistent support for the hypothesis either across our sample of advanced OECD countries or members of the BRICS group, excluding Russia. An explanation of current account disequilibria requires going beyond a narrow focus on fiscal imbalances in the context of the twin deficits hypothesis.

R. G. Collingwood is mostly remembered for his theory that historical understanding consists in re-enacting the thoughts of the historical figure whom one is studying. His first recognizable expres...

The present study compared cognitive abilities and academic achievement of adolescents studying in three different school systems namely Urdu medium schools, English medium schools, and Cambridge system schools. The sample comprised of 1001 secondary school student. Cognitive abilities were assessed by Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (1960) and marks obtained by the students in the last annual examination were used as an index of academic achievement. Results showed that cognitive abilities of the students were positively associated with academic achievement of the respondents. It was further found that cognitive abilities and academic achievement of students studying in Cambridge school system was better as compared to those studying in other systems. Post-hoc comparison revealed that level of academic achievement of Urdu medium schools was lower as compared to English medium and Cambridge system of schools. The findings suggest that difference in schooling system influenced cognitive abilities and academic achievement of the students. Results further demonstrated that gender was a significant predictor of academic achievement in both Urdu and English medium schools. Future implications of the study were also discussed.

The theory of the long-run perspective aims to explain how economies grow. On the other hand, Kaldor developed a theory that concerns not only this objective but to build a model also considering the implications in the income distribution. This paper consists of a rigorous review of the evolution of Kaldor’s Theory, treating with government activities, the financial market, and so on, to show the importance of the theme in our days. One contribution of this paper is to lead the researchers to a solid understanding of Growth and Income Distribution Models derivate from the Cambridge School and to present a new vision of the relevance of the heterodox scientific world. La teoría de la perspectiva de largo plazo tiene como objetivo explicar cómo crecen las economías. Kaldor desarrolló una teoría que no solo busca este objetivo sino construir un modelo considerando también las implicaciones en la distribución del ingreso. Este trabajo es una revisión rigurosa de la evolución de la Teoría de Kaldor, que trata las actividades gubernamentales, el mercado financiero, etc., para mostrar la importancia del tema en nuestros días. Una contribución del artículo es explica de manera sólida los Modelos de Crecimiento y Distribución de Ingresos derivados de la Escuela de Cambridge y muestra la relevancia del mundo científico heterodoxo. A teoria da perspectiva de longo prazo visa explicar como as economias crescem. Por outro lado, Kaldor desenvolveu uma teoria que diz respeito não apenas a esse objetivo, mas a construir um modelo considerando também as implicações na distribuição de renda. Este trabalho consiste em uma revisão rigorosa da evolução da Teoria de Kaldor, tratando da atuação do governo, do mercado financeiro, etc., para mostrar a importância do tema em nossos dias. Uma contribuição deste artigo é levar os pesquisadores a uma compreensão sólida dos Modelos de Distribuição de Renda e Crescimento derivados da Escola de Cambridge e apresentar uma nova visão da relevância do mundo científico heterodoxo.

While the discipline of International Relations (IR) has a long tradition of celebrating ‘great thinkers’ and appropriating their ideas for contemporary theories, it has rarely accounted for how these authors came to be seen as ‘great’ in the first place. This is at least partly a corollary of the discipline’s long-standing aversion to methodological reflection in its engagement with intellectual history, and it echoes IR’s infamous tendency to misportray these great thinkers’ ideas more broadly. Drawing on existing attempts to import the methodological insights of historians of political thought into IR, this article puts forward a unified approach to the study of great thinkers in IR that combines the tenets of so-called ‘Cambridge School’ contextualism with those of what broadly falls under the label of reception theory. I make the case for the possibility of developing a coherent methodology through the combination of what is often seen as separate strands of intellectual history, and for the value of such an approach in IR. In doing so, the article ultimately offers a more rigorous methodology for engaging with the thought of great thinkers in IR, for analyzing the way a specific author’s ideas come to have an impact in practice, and for assessing the extent to which these ideas are distorted in the process.

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.

The publication of Richard Tuck's 2012 Seeley Lectures constituted an important event in intellectual history and political theory. The Sleeping Sovereign reflects the depth of Tuck's nearly forty years of historical inquiry into the concepts of rights, reason of state, and freedom, beginning with Natural Rights Theories. The leading member of the “Cambridge school” of the study of the history of political thought in the United States, and the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government at Harvard University, Tuck combines a contextualist, and often intertextualist, approach to the interpretation of canonical works with a theorist's attention to the value these works retain for contemporary political life.

We propose a two-step method for studying the history of political thought roughly in line with the contextualism of the Cambridge School. It reframes the early Cambridge School as a bug-detecting program for the outdated conceptual baggage we unknowingly accommodate with our political terminology. Such accommodation often entails propositions that are inconsistent with even our most cherished political opinions. These bugs can cause political arguments to crash. This reframing takes seriously the importance of theories of meaning in the formative methodological arguments of the Cambridge School and updates the argument in light of new developments. We argue the new orthodoxy of Saul Kripke's causal theory of meaning in the philosophy of language better demonstrates the importance of contextual analysis to modern political theory.

This paper studies the concept of complicity through the work of two Cambridge School poets, J.H. Prynne and Peter Riley. The acknowledgement of complicity in social, political, and economic injustices has been central for poets influenced by J.H. Prynne, and the resulting poetry, often difficult and alienating, nevertheless seeks to give lyric expression to the historical burden of being at the dispensing end of global violence. Peter Riley’s work, on the other hand, implies an ethical position that also includes a real possibility of opting out of exploitative and violent historical tendencies: complicity here is emphatically within the ambit of volition. Through readings of Prynne’s ‘Refuse Collection’ – which was written in response to the torture at Abu Ghraib – and Riley’s Alstonefield: A Poem and Excavations, this paper argues that the differences between these positions are more a matter of emphasis than of kind.

Intellectual history, and especially the branch sometimes identified as the Cambridge school, continues to be criticized for not being sufficiently global in outlook. This article does not defend intellectual history. Rather, it underscores the extent to which the well-known intellectual historian John Pocock has opened specific avenues for the study of past intellectual matters in distinctly non-Western contexts. The article suggests that these openings spring directly from basic features of Pocock's general and well-known conception of intellectual history. Pocock's work beyond the West amounts not simply to incidental sallies but is the formulation and application of an overall strategy that readily encompasses a globalizing agenda of widening the empirical basis as required by a given subject. Postprint

Recent work on the history of political thought, exploiting digital resources, is challenging the idea that empirically and hermeneutically minded political scientists must work independently in silos. Work by students of the Cambridge School and work by textual data miners are showing the way toward a new hermeneutical circle—one in which empirically and hermeneutically minded political scientists can use digital resources to analyze diverse texts and make groundbreaking discoveries on relationships between textual uses of language and political change. I analyze this new trend toward different sorts of political scientists using digital resources to study ideas, to outline underlying paradigms relating language and politics in these respective fields, and to consider how they could be brought into productive conversation. I then consider how such conversation would enrich subdisciplinary understandings of the role of language in politics. Ultimately, I use this analysis to generate a broader model for how empirically and hermeneutically inclined political scientists can benefit from collaboration in the age of digital humanities.

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved. We draw on the seminal contribution to economics by Luigi Pasinetti, respond to his call to reverse what he saw as the 'original sin' of classical economists exacerbated by neoclassical economists, namely the assumption of non-increasing returns to scale, and move towards building a post-classical economics. We outline the contours of a post-classical framework that draws on key themes and contributions from Pasinetti on learning, technical progress, increasing returns, resource creation, trade and catching up, and contributions from within and without economics that are in line with, lend support to and challenge it. We advocate the pressing need and opportune timing for a concerted effort to revitalise ideas from the once vibrant 'Cambridge School' of economics and help develop a fresh, more pluralist and inclusive post-classical economics that cuts across divides and opens up opportunities for a less 'dismal science'.

Diverse conceptions of A.C. Pigou as a ‘Marshallian’ economist exist. Key areas are identified both where scholars have perceived a continuity between Pigou’s work and Marshallian thought, and where they have perceived a discontinuity. There are wider reflections on the major characteristics that scholars have attributed to the Cambridge School in its Marshallian form.

This article presents an account of those works, related to conceptual history and historiographical issues, written by the American historian of political thought Melvin Richter. The attention is primarily directed toward the reception of the German historiographical style called “Begriffsgeschichte” (“history of concepts”), and especially on its reception among Anglophone scholars. Therefore, the main objective of the article is to throw light on Richter’s understanding of Begriffsgeschichte, and to sum up his efforts to put in contact Koselleck’s “history of concepts” with the works of authors such as Quentin Skinner and John G. A. Pocock, who are associated with the so-called “Cambridge school contextualists”. Thus, the aim is to point out their direct thought about Begriffsgeschichte, and consequently, to see how they’ve reacted to Richter’s proposals concerning the possibility of adopting that “history of concepts” as the frame for future historical researches. By doing so, and relying mainly on the extensive contributions appeared on the pages of the specialized periodicals, this article highlights some of the principal reactions to the theoretical and practical implications of “conceptual history”; in particular as they are emerging in the midst of what is indeed a recent and still ongoing international debate. Furthermore, the article tries to compare Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte with some works of “analytical bibliography” (which is a highly reliable form of physical and textual analysis of books). It is also interesting to note that these bibliographical studies are associated with Cambridge University as well as the historical researches of Skinner and Pocock.

Lucian Ashworth invites us to expand the notion of disciplinary history in order to analyze the production of International Relations (IR) thinkers and IR communities as arguments in context (and, one should add, in contexts not defined by arbitrary disciplinary boundaries). Surveying how the history of political thought has been renewed by the Cambridge School, the analytical tradition (Mark Bevir), and the history of science (Peter Galison), Ashworth argues that a proper historical approach to the development of our international concepts does not mean that one is stuck with mere “narratives” that are equally valid. “The role of historical methods,” he suggests, is “to help us judge these narratives on their own merits” and, one would add, critically discriminate among them.

Much has been made of the digital humanities, yet it remains an underexplored field in relation to intellectual history. This paper aims to add to the little literature which does exist by offering a survey of the ideas and issues facing would-be practitioners. This includes: an overview of what the digital humanities are; reflections on what they offer intellectual history and how they may be problematic in regard to, first, accessing texts, and second, analysing source material; and a conclusion with three reflections on future best practices – to be sceptical of digital sources, to be reflective of methodologies and how they may need to be modified when engaging with the digital humanities, and to embrace more directly the methodological, statistical, and technical aspects behind digital humanities. The aim is not to provide all the answers – at this stage that is impossible – but to be part of an emerging and ongoing discussion.

This chapter examines the interactions that occurred between economics and psychology in Cambridge from the last quarter of the nineteenth century up until the Second World War. It does so by examining the work of four Cambridge economists (Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou and John Maynard Keynes) and three Cambridge psychologists (James Ward, G.F. Stout and Charles Myers) in parallel, in order to detect any similarity of approach or theme in their work. The first section of the chapter documents the influence of the three psychologists at Cambridge, and the second section examines how the four Cambridge economists utilized concepts from psychology in their economic theory. Some concerns common to both Cambridge economists and psychologists are detected, and some significant differences in how psychology was used by the four economists are outlined.

When Joan Robinson visited Monash University in 1975 she was at the height of her fame. She had just brought out a new alternative economics textbook and was strongly tipped, in the International Women’s Year, to win the Nobel Prize in economics. The Cambridge School of Economics, which she represented, was in late bloom but it was the neoclassical school that was proving resurgent and already exhibiting a strong presence at Monash. It would make for theatrics when she arrived there. Although the visit to Australia overall was only for a few months, she gave lectures to first-year students at several universities and made several public presentations. The timing of her visit was poignant, with Australia, like Britain, caught in the throes of stagflation. There was an ongoing reappraisal of macroeconomic policy. Robinson’s visit occurred while Milton Friedman, too, was visiting Australia on a stockbroker-funded lecture tour to push the monetarist explanation of inflation. Drawing on her correspondence with...

Over the past quarter century, the Cambridge School of Intellectual History has had a profound influence on the study of political theory in the U.S. The scholarship of historians such as John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, and John Pocock has almost single-handedly defined the terms with which political scientists understand early modern thought, and consequently liberalism and its alternatives. In this essay I analyze Quentin Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” as the seminal argument for the Cambridge School's interpretive strategy. In particular, I note the degree to which Skinner attacked the scholarship of Leo Strauss in order to establish the Cambridge approach. Contrary to Skinner, I argue Strauss too has a concern for genuine historical understanding. I conclude with a re-reading of Strauss' Persecution and the Art of Writing in order to show that Strauss' interpretive strategy ultimately comes much closer to the “historicity” claimed by Skinner and others.

Scholars loosely affiliated with the “Cambridge School” (e.g., Pocock, Skinner, Viroli, and Pettit) accentuate rule of law, common good, class equilibrium, and non-domination in Machiavelli's political thought and republicanism generally but underestimate the Florentine's preference for class conflict and ignore his insistence on elite accountability. The author argues that they obscure the extent to which Machiavelli is an anti-elitist critic of the republican tradition, which they fail to disclose was predominantly oligarchic. The prescriptive lessons these scholars draw from republicanism for contemporary politics reinforce rather than reform the “senatorial,” electorally based, and socioeconomically agnostic republican model (devised by Machiavelli's aristocratic interlocutor, Guicciardini, and refined by Montesquieu and Madison) that permits common citizens to acclaim but not determine government policies. Cambridge School textual interpretations and practical proposals have little connection with Machiavelli's “tribunate,” class-specific model of popular government elaborated in The Discourses , one that relies on extra-electoral accountability techniques and embraces deliberative popular assemblies.

This paper pays tribute to Luigi Pasinetti as an historian of economic thought in general but, in particular, to his work on the Cambridge economists, and his interpretations mainly of Piero Sraffa and John Maynard Keynes, but also of Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor. With them he shared everyday Cambridge life, and he is universally associated with them in terms of a common 'school' - the Cambridge school. The purpose of the paper is not to provide a systematic account, but to offer some illustrations of Pasinetti's style of doing history of economic thought and how it developed over time. It is argued that the theoretical framework to which Pasinetti has dedicated so much of his intellectual efforts is built on his understanding of what Cambridge economics was about and how its scope and aims should be pursued and integrated. As such, it is a personal construction which stands, alongside the individual contributions by the Cambridge economists with whom Pasinetti associates himself, as a milestone in the landscape of non-mainstream economics.

The third edition of the Cambridge School Shakespeare series draws on over twenty years of research and practice to consolidate an approach to Shakespeare which enlivened the way the plays were taught in secondary school classrooms. The third Cambridge School Shakespeare series was released in 2014 and 2015 with new features and a companion website with supplementary resources. A short history of the series, an overview of current research and the new features of the third edition of the Cambridge School Shakespeare series will form the basis of this paper.

In the wake of research at the Cambridge school on the structure of the housechold in traditional communities, a debate arose among historians concerning one of Peter Laslett's principal conclusions : the predominance of the nuclear household in traditional European populations. But is the debate well put? Would it not be better, rather than contrasting this or that local result with Laslett's conclusions, to question a method that consists in drawing conclusions concerning the dominant type of family organization in a community, based upon classification of households made for the census. The author is in agreement with the methodological criticisms that Lutz Berkner made of P. Laslett and tests them by tracing the evolution of eighty households of Bessède (Pays de Sault, Upper Valley of the Aude) using the nominal rolls of the census for the years 1846, 1851, 1856, 1861, and 1866. While each of these censuses comprises no more than 20 to 30% complex households, a diachronic study confirms that in this case, the stem-family is the dominant type of familial organization. Moreover, the author analyzes the reasons for which, in upper Aude valley, there is no positive correlation between the size of the household and its complexity., Fine Agnès. La famille-souche pyrénéenne au XIXe siècle : quelques réflexions de méthode. In: Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations. 32ᵉ année, N. 3, 1977. pp. 478-487.

This chapter introduces two types of methods of textual analasys by dealing with an empirical case (the state of the union discourses of the Bush Jr. and Obama administrations). The first part demonstrates the interest of using statistical textual analysis to explore voluminous corpus of texts, test assumptions, identify major lexical worlds and increase methodological rigor of textual data analysis. The second test of methods comes from political theory, with a focus on specific textual dimensions: classical or Straussian approach (the exegesis of texts), neo-Marxism (the linguistic structure of hegemony), Cambridge school or Skinnerian perspective (the usage of linguistic conventions in conceptual and historical contexts). By linking these two kinds of methods, the chapter intends to show the advantages of cross-fertilization between quantitative and qualitative tools for understanding political discourses.