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The article discusses the main theoretical provisions of the republican tradition in modern political theory. The main attention is focused on the works of F. Pettit and Q. Skinner. The position of the republican tradition in the political theory of the second half of the twentieth century is presented and the popularity of this tradition is argued today, the theoretical background of the actualization of republican theory is highlighted. It is shown how the republican theory was updated by the Cambridge School of the History of Political Thought. The features of the republican theory, which consists of two points, are considered: the openness of the republican project to alternative political theories (projects), representatives of the republican theory focus not on political theory, but on the history of political thought, that is, they do not develop their own theoretical project, but actualize in political theory and adapt the republican tradition to modern political practices. The origins of the republican tradition in the history of Western political thought are traced, special attention is focused on the development of republican ideas during the civil war in England (1642-1651) and the political/ideological confrontation between parliamentarians and royalists, focuses on the concepts of «political body» and «king-in-parliament». The criticism of the republican understanding of liberty by T. Hobbes and the consequences of this criticism for the political theory of the Modern era is traced. It is shown how the republican understanding of freedom is supplanted by the negative concept of freedom in modern times, why the liberal theory begins to be based on the negative concept of freedom. The republican understanding of freedom as non-domonation and the relationship between the concepts of positive liberty, negative liberty and liberty as non-domination are considered. Criticism of the republican tradition of a liberal interpretation of liberty is presented. The significance of the theoretical developments of the republican tradition for modern political theory is highlighted and the fundamental difference between the republican approach and the liberal one is shown.

This is a very able piece; Samuel James has done a great deal of research, and brought to light a number of articles I don’t remember writing. There is a difficulty, however, that he aims to contra...

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.

There have been analogous debates on the meaning of influence within the history of political thought, and these too have been shaped by a parallel understanding of influence as Nietzschean and emanational in nature. Despite lasting acrimony from Quentin Skinner, at the height of Cambridge School revolution in the 1960s, recent scholarship in the history of political thought has reasserted the benefit to be had from examining claims of influence between thinkers. Prior to examining these claims in the penultimate chapter, it is necessary to outline the disputes within the history of political thought on the subject of influence. Methodological disputes surrounding the role of influence are nothing new, and stem from the rejection of superficial links made between distant, unrelated thinkers. The principal aim of this chapter is to examine Condren’s statement that his critique of the terms of qualitative appraisal ‘is neither an exclusive property nor is its domain restricted to a single inheritance’ within political theory.

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.

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.

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.

In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner has three aims: creating a sort of reference book for hundreds of primary texts in multiple languages, illuminating a more general historical theme using late medieval and early modern political texts, and giving us a history of political thought with a genuinely historical character. Skinner allows us to see political theorists creatively wrestling with difficult political problems of their day, and attempting to solve them through their writing. Skinner’s critics, however, cannot shake the sense that placing these texts in historical contexts robs them of some of their profundity and value as works of political theory. This chapter examines some of Skinner’s treatments of particular authors, notes some difficulties with the book’s methods, and situates the debate around Foundations within the emergence of a self-conscious Cambridge School.

SummaryIan Hunter has made a name for himself as a critic of German university metaphysics, finding its progeny at work in places where many of us would not even think of looking, for example in the late twentieth-century celebration of theory in the humanities. Some of his recent work has focused on a rather different issue: the methodological task of making intellectual history empirical. Here he builds on Quentin Skinner's rationale for the Cambridge School's efforts to make the history of political thought more properly historical. Skinner's argument draws on the work of R. G. Collingwood, at least in its earlier versions, and on neo-Kantian tendencies in mid-twentieth century Oxford philosophy. Thus, in aligning his methodological programme with Skinner's argument, Hunter may risk bringing elements of university metaphysics back in another form.

This volume provides an introductory guide to interpretive approaches in political theory. There is a wide, and perhaps bewildering, assortment of interpretive approaches available to students of political theory today. The aim of this volume is to help readers navigate their way through this dense and diverse field by providing an overview of the backgrounds and practices that inform these approaches to interpretation. Mastering any of the approaches surveyed in this volume can be a daunting task. So much has already been written on Straussianism, the Cambridge School, and feminism that the novice may have no idea where to begin. Moreover, the texts detailing approaches like deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and genealogy are often so prohibitively dense as to discourage new readers from making the attempt at all. The aim of this volume is thus to provide an introduction that renders these approaches more accessible. Although the book is intended primarily for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who want to know about the backgrounds, methods, and objectives associated with different interpretive approaches, seasoned practitioners of particular approaches will also find the discussions of other, perhaps less familiar, approaches useful as a foundation for further inquiry. Interpretation is an essential activity of political theory. Political theory is arich, complex, and contested interdisciplinary field of study that takes diverse forms and pursues a variety of interrelated activities including historical narrative, textual exegesis, normative theorizing, applied ethics, empirical analysis, and political commentary.1 For all the differences in form, style, and objective among these and other endeavors, however, the interpretation of texts is an indispensable activity in political theory. Although interpretation is arguably an unavoidable (ifsometimes unacknowledged) aspect of all scholarship-if not of any and every engagement with the world2-political theorists face the special challenge of interpreting texts that come as close as anything to defining the core of this increasingly pluralistic and unabashedly undisciplined field of study. Even if the analysis of written texts is not their primary concern, the requirements of professional training, teaching, and scholarship make it necessary for political theorists to interpret written texts. But what distinguishes-and sometimes divides-different political theorists are the different methods, techniques, and procedures they use to render texts intelligible and to explain their meaning. The interpretive approaches explored in this volume exemplify this diversity.Some of these schools of thought, such as Straussianism, the Cambridge School, Marxism, feminism, genealogy, and deconstruction, have attracted sizeable followings. Others, such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, negative dialectics, and Greimassian semiotics, are perhaps lesser-known approaches that have (so far) worked largely around the margins of political theory. Others may be familiar (by name and reputation if nothing else) to most political theorists as distinct modes of analyzing norms, practices, and institutions, but not exclusively as ways of reading texts. Some of these approaches were specifically designed for the reading of canonical texts in the history of political thought, while others are adapted from approaches first developed or used primarily for the analysis of discourses, institutions, social systems, and other phenomena in more empirical forms of scholarship. Some were developed by self-identified political theorists working within the larger field of political science, while others were formulated by scholars and thinkers in psychiatry, philosophy, linguistics, and other disciplines. Regardless of its provenance, though, each offers a distinct perspective on the meaning and significance of texts that makes it worthy of study. The diversity of approaches used in political theory today stands in markedcontrast to the situation that existed when political theory first emerged as a distinct sub-field of political science. The approaches that dominated political theory until the 1960s generally treated it as a single continuous tradition centered on a fairly limited set of fundamental questions and topics. During the latter part of the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, political theory was chiefly conceived as the history of political thought in the “West.” With the emergence of political theory as a distinct sub-field within political science-which had itself become established at the start of the twentieth century as a distinct discipline with its own professional associations, journals, subject-matter, and standards of scholarship-the study of political thought was often defined in terms of the evolutionary development of a continuous tradition that stretched from the ancient Greeks into the present. Scholarship focused on those thinkers who were either deemed to be 1) “great” according to some timeless standard, 2) representative of political thought in their own eras, or 3) influential in the subsequent development of political thought or practice. Studies often took the form of narrative and critical commentary on the so-called Great Booksof Western political thought composed by a select group of luminaries, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Other thinkers also made notable appearances in studies during this period, but a canon centered around the aforementioned thinkers had taken shape. Although there were always exceptions, the field was dominated by studieswhich assumed that works by thinkers from very different time periods and social and cultural contexts were preoccupied with many of the same basic political concerns. There were always studies on individual thinkers and surveys of the political thought of particular periods (e.g., the Middle Ages),3 but the works that probably did the most to define the field of political theory at this time were much broader in scope. Some of the most influential studies in the last century took the form of sweeping surveys of the history of political thought presented in chronological order.4

Mark Bevir’s book stands as one of the most influential recent interventions into debates central to the history of political thought, intellectual history, and textual interpretation more broadly. The introductory essay to this symposium situates Bevir’s position as not only a “middle way” between Straussian and postmodern deconstructive approaches, but one that distinguishes itself from the leading claimants to that terrain, namely the “Cambridge School” most closely associated with Skinner and Pocock. I conclude by briefly characterizing the four subsequent essays, which both engage Bevir’s work through constructive criticism and extend it to issues of contemporary political theory and practice.

This article traces the development of contextualist methodology in the study of the history of political thought/political theory after WWII. It argues that the so-called ‘Cambridge School’, often regarded as the core of historicist contextualism, arose during the 1950s and 1960s in response to dilemmas that were largely internal to (the history of) political philosophy as it was practiced in Britain in an academic culture dominated by analytic philosophy. This first stage of contextualist theorizing, usually associated with Laslett, Skinner and Pocock, was highly influential, but it also contributed to the formation of a new set of problems. These were connected to the diversification and internationalization of the historicist contextualist study of political thought after the 1960s. The ‘second stage’ of contextualist theorizing was shaped by post-analytic and post-modernist impulses among others. Because of the variety of philosophical and conceptual commitments on notions central to the field such as ‘political thinking’, ‘politics’, or ‘power’, it is unlikely that the present historicist contextualist approaches would come to share a unified methodology or theory of historical interpretation.

As a discipline, the history of political thought itself has a history of competing methods: on the one hand, there are political theorists whose principle interest is in the use to which the ideas they find can be put—they seek to put the discoveries to work on instances of perennial problems in the present. On the other hand, there are those whose real interest is in trying to understand what the ideas meant at the time they were written—they seek to reconstruct the place of the ideas within a given historical context and how those ideas functioned to address political problems at that time. The temporal and intentional focus of these two approaches is so different that they might constitute different enterprises entirely. To the extent that historians of political thought are interested in history, the predominant method for analyzing the meaning and context of texts for the last few decades has been the so-called Cambridge School. It is the contention of this article that while the focus of the Cambridge School on the importance of contextual readings should open up the history of political thought to extra-European contexts, in fact its method serves to close down this possibility by emphasizing the importance of continuity between places in the past and the present of the historian. In other words, this method reduces to a process of narrating the historical identity of the Eurocentric discipline. Furthermore, I suggest that the work of the wartime Kyoto School contains methodological insights into the history of political thought that might overcome this problem and provide for a more inclusive (or at least a less exclusive) approach to the field.

This paper explores the advance of the study of nationalism with particular reference to hitherto neglected methodologies. After suggesting what might be the lesson to be learned from Ernest Gellner's critique of Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy, I set out some of the considerations and questions which guide my own attempt at a definition of nationalism after Gellner. These are essentially concerned with the function of meaning for ‘real people’, that is, with the substantiation of the nation through the study of ideologies and feelings, links between interest and identity, conditions of responsiveness and the differential success of mass mobilisation. In the remainder of the paper, I explore the benefit that may be achieved from adopting the methodologies of the so-called Cambridge school of the history of political thought and of social representations in social psychology.

The postulate of equipollence is the main argument of Pyrrhonian sceptics who assert the equality of current positive beliefs about the world with regard to being convincing or unconvincing. In sceptical reasoning, suspension of judgement follows from the manifest absence of an ultimate point of reference. Several major exponents of the Cambridge School have championed a sceptical approach to the history of political thought. They assert the equipollence of competing interpretations of the intentions of historical thinkers and eschew facile conclusions. They also claim that their insights can be brought to bear politically. The latter claim, however, seems to presuppose a set of convictions which sceptics generally do not hold. Drawing on the theory of critical rationalism I discuss whether the retrenchment of the possibility of certain historical knowledge carried out by the authors of the Cambridge School narrows the scope of political action thus defeating the authors’ own claim to be engaged in the furthering of critical reason.

This article aims to map and investigate the methodological debate spearheaded by the Cambridge School of history of political thought in the last four decades, focusing on the formulations of Quentin Skinner and the main objections raised by his critics. After a brief presentation of the prescriptions in Skinner's methods, the article discusses how his linguistic contextualism has been criticized for: a) his epistemological commitments (denounced alternately as relativist and positivist); b) his adherence to intentionalism; and c) his tendency towards "antiquarianism". The article concludes that of these three modalities of objections, the attribution of "antiquarianism" was the one that most compromised Skinner's original methodological formulations, recently leading him to virtually abandon his original antipresentist thrust. Dans cet article, on souhaite situer et examiner le débat méthodologique proposé par l'École de Cambridge au sujet de l'histoire de la pensée politique dans les quatre dernières décennies, tout en insistant sur les positions de Quentin Skinner et les principales objections soulevées par ses critiques. Après une rapide présentation des prescriptions méthodologiques de Skinner, on voit que son contextualisme linguistique a reçu plusieurs critiques: a) par ses choix épistémologiques (dénoncés comme relativistes, ou encore positivistes); b) par son adhésion à l'intentionalisme; et c) par sa tendance à "l'ancien". On conclut que, parmi ces trois types d'objections, c'est l'attribution "d'ancien" qui a le plus nui aux formulations méthodologiques originales de Skinner, le menant récemment au virtuel abandon de son ardeur anti-présent initiale.

ed from it and more readily communicated. To write a textbook in the history of ideas, of course, is simply to fall prey systematically to this temptation which, incidentally, is why textbooks in the subject are not merely poor things, but are actively misleading, and why this difficulty is not to be circumvented even by providing textbooks in which the "message" is given in the author's own words. The inevitable result which can be illustrated from far more respectable sources than the synoptic and pedagogic histories will still be a form of writing which might be labelled the mythology of coherence. The writing of the history of ethical and political philosophy is pervaded by this mythology.69 Thus if "current scholarly opinion" can see no coherence in Hooker's Laws, the moral is to look harder, for "coherence" is surely "present."70 If there is doubt about the "most central themes" of Hobbes's political philosophy, it becomes the duty of 'the exegete to discover the "inner coherence of his doctrine" by reading the Leviathan a number of times, until in a perhaps excessively revealing phrase he finds that its argument has "assumed some coherence."'7' If there is no coherent system "readily accessible" to the student of Hume's political works, the exegete's duty is "to rummage through one work after another" until the "high degree 69. A similar point about the problem of accommodating different "levels of abstraction" has been made by J. G. A. Pocock, "The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry," in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series, ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford, 1962), 183-202. This "scripturalist tendency" is also mentioned by Peter Laslett sub "Political Philosophy, History of," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards et al., 8 vols. (New York, 1967), VI, 371. 70. Arthur S. McGrade, "The Coherence of Hooker's Polity: The Books on Power," Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963), 163. 71. Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford, 1957), vii. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.210 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 06:00:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 17 of consistency in the whole corpus" is duly displayed (again in a rather revealing phrase) "at all costs."72 If Herder's political ideas are "rarely worked out systematically," and are to be found "scattered throughout his writings, sometimes within the most unexpected contexts," the duty of the exegete again becomes that of trying "to present these ideas in some coherent form."73 The most revealing fact about such reiterations of the scholar's task is that the metaphors habitually used are those of effort and quest; the ambition is always to "arrive" at "a unified interpretation," to "gain" a "coherent view of an author's system."74 This procedure gives the thoughts of various classic writers a coherence, and an air generally of a closed system, which they may never have attained or even been meant to attain. If it is first assumed, for example, that the business of interpreting Rousseau's thought must center on the discovery of his most "fundamental thought," it will readily cease to seem a matter of importance that he contributed over several decades to several quite different fields of enquiry.75 Again, if it is first assumed that every aspect of Hobbes's thought was designed as a contribution to the whole of his "Christian" system, it will cease to seem at all peculiar to suggest that we may turn to his autobiography to elucidate so crucial a point as the relations between ethics and political life.76 Again, if it is first assumed that even Burke never essentially contradicted himself or changed his mind, but that a "coherent moral philosophy" underlies everything he wrote, then it will cease to seem at all unrealistic to treat "the corpus of his published writings" as "a single body of thought."77 Some measure of the lengths to which such procedures of abstracting the variety of a man's thoughts to the level at which they can be said (all passion spent) to "attain" some coherence is provided by a recent study of Marx's social and political thought. Here it has seemed necessary, to justify the exclusion of Engels's thoughts, to point out that Marx and Engels were after all "two distinct human beings."78 It does sometimes happen, of course, that the aims and successes of a given writer may remain so 72. John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York, 1963), v-vi. 73. F. M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought (Oxford, 1965), xix. Cf. also 139. 74. E.g., J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas (London, 1965), 10. 75. Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, tr. and ed. Peter Gay (Bloomington, Indiana, 1954), 46, 62. As Gay indicates in his Introduction, it may well have been salutary at the time when Cassirer was writing to have insisted on such an emphasis, but it remains questionable whether the somewhat a priori assumptions of the study are not misconceived. 76. F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1964), 28. 77. Charles Parkin, The Moral Basis of Burke's Political Thought (Cambridge, 1956), 2, 4. 78. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968), 3. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.210 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 06:00:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

con Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, is contrasted with that of J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, leading representatives of the so-called Cambridge School. Koselleck's unit of analysis in sketching the development and change of hu man consciousness is the distinct concept of Grundbegriff whereas the his torians of the Cambridge School study linguistic contexts in their entirety.1 This is certainly not an unimportant difference. There are, however, also a number of similarities between the two approaches. In order to facilitate a synthesis of the results of both approaches for the benefit of future research these similarities will be discussed here.

Changes of State." Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law, by Annabel S. Brett. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2011. xiv, 242 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Annabel Brett's book is an accomplished study of the contested boundaries between "nature" and the "city" in early modern natural law discourse. She traces the various discourses on the relation between the political and natural spheres from the influences of ancient and medieval political thought on early modern writers to the debates between and amongst scholastic Catholic political thinkers, Protestant Aristotelians, and others, highlighting the often radical departures from earlier traditions in the thought of Hugo Grotius and especially Thomas Hobbes. The book's achievements are at several levels: as an impressively detailed intellectual history of some of the wide-ranging controversies preoccupying natural law theorists in sixteenth- to mid-seventeenth-century Europe; as a cogent analysis of what is at stake in Grotius's and above all Hobbes's significant developments of natural law theory: and as an innovative approach to the study of political thought. Brett's introduction nicely sets out the major themes of her work and reveals her methodological concerns. As is clear from her copious footnotes, Brett's study arises out of the so-called Cambridge School approach to the history of political thought as epitomized by the work of such scholars as Quentin Skinner, Noel Malcolm, and James Tully. Hence she is concerned with the formation of the political languages of natural law as they emerge in European thought, and her interpretation of Hobbes is indebted to Skinner's analysis of Hobbesian liberty in contradistinction to republican notions of freedom--implicitly, she shares Skinner's critique of Hobbes's position. But her focus is on intellectual context as much as on the context of historical practice: as she writes, her analysis is "trained upon the characteristic argumentative motifs of this idiom or "way of talking" as a whole, rather than on particular authors as agents within their specific contexts" (p. 9). Thus her work both broadens, for example, contextualist interpretations of Hobbes by situating his thought relative to continental European natural law (rather than focusing mainly on the historical circumstances in England surrounding Hobbes's work), and offers a unique historical perspective which indirectly engages with the work of such contemporary political thinkers as Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben on natural, territorial, juridical, and political spaces. The study is framed by the divisions between nature and the city, or Libertas and Imperium--in the frontispiece to Hobbes's De Cive (reproduced in Brett's introduction)--divisions which nevertheless are interpenetrated in various ways in Hobbes's thought. Brett shows how Hobbes's account relates to earlier treatments of the nature/city problematic by addressing a dominant theme in each chapter as dealt with by natural law theorists. In "Travelling the Borderline," she relates Francisco de Vitoria's treatment of ius gentium as a law of humanity which sanctions the free movement of travellers into foreign countries to Domingo de Soto's assertion of the right of beggars to travel freely across borders: their chief activity as mendicants seeking to preserve themselves as human beings straddles the "borderline between city and nature, in the physical but not political space of animals" (p. …

R. G. Collingwood’s description of the difference between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of an event had profound implications for historians of political thought in the 1960s, when it played a role in inspiring the articulation of the approach to intellectual history that has come to be known as that of ‘the Cambridge School’.2 Collingwood’s choice of the example of Ceasar’s death at the hands of assassins seeking to save the republic was fortuitous, in so far as the work of those associated with the Cambridge School has heavily contributed to a remarkable upsurge of interest in republicanism as an historical tradition of political argument.3 Much has been written about this development since the publication of John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment in 1975 and Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought in 1978; with the recent appearance of reassessments of historical republicanism by these authors, a re-evaluation of the subject is timely.