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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...

In Ajit Sinha and Alex M. Thomas’ edited volume on Pluralistic Economics and Its History, the contributors “reflect on the historicity of their own research agendas.” (2) Their history of economic thought volume deals with a variety of subjects ranging from post-Keynesian, Marxian and institutional economics, to the Cambridge School, structuralist dynamics in economics and general equilibrium theory. Moreover, there are three chapters that deal specifically with the history of economics in In...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 It reframes the early Cambridge School as a bug-detecting program for the outdated conceptual baggage we unknowingly accommodate with our political terminology.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.

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 ...

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.

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...

The Birth of Territory is an outstanding scholarly achievement, a book ‘of remarkable depth and breadth’, as noted by Alec Murphy in his comment, a book that already promises to become a ‘classic’ in geography, together with very few others published in the past decades. But Elden's book is also a difficult one to position within mainstream human geography. Its genealogical engagement with multiple sources/texts in various historical and linguistic contexts is far reaching, and it has very few precedents in the discipline—since it is deliberately inspired by the Cambridge school of contextual history, and the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte, conceptual history. The Birth of Territory is also methodologically challenging, as its account of territory is carved out of a clear selection of ‘presences and absences’ operated by the author that, like all work of this kind, is open to criticism in relation to the strategies of inclusion/exclusion (of texts, concepts, people) adopted. What follows is a brief account of an Author meets Critics panel on The Birth of Territory held at the AAG Conference held in Tampa in April 2014.

In this excellent new book, Reidar Maliks supplies, for the first time, an interpretation motivated by Cambridge School commitments of the political theory of Immanuel Kant. It is, of course, not t...

SummaryThis article examines approaches to early socialism from an intellectual history viewpoint, focussing on British Owenite socialism. It assesses the author's own research in the field over the past thirty-five years in an effort to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches he initially adopted to the field. It attempts to balance insights associated with the so-called “Cambridge School” with those gained in particular from the standpoints of the history of religion and the history of emotions, and a theory of group identity which can in part be associated with the history of utopianism

Alasdair MacIntyre is often recognized for his contributions to moral philosophy. In this article, I argue that his reputation should be rehabilitated as a theorist who has realized an essentially critical conception of social science that moves beyond the old dogma of value neutrality. The article’s first section narrates how MacIntyre’s unique conception of a critical social science arose out of debates with Peter Winch, whose defense of value neutrality MacIntyre found untenable. He responded by developing a social science every bit as interpretive as Winch’s, but also inherently critical and normative. The second section explores how MacIntyre’s vision of social science can generate criticism of major approaches to political inquiry today, including mainstream political science, Quentin Skinner’s Cambridge School, and Michel Foucault’s post-structuralism.

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.

Was there an Enlightenment in Ireland? Was there even a distinctively Irish Enlightenment? Few scholars have bothered even to pose this question. Historians of Ireland during the era of Protestant Ascendancy have tended to be all-rounders rather than specialists; their traditional preoccupations are constitutional clashes between London and Dublin, religious conflict, agrarian unrest and popular politicization. With few exceptions there has been no tradition of intellectual history, and little interest in the methodological debates associated with the rise of the “Cambridge school”. Most advances in our understanding of Irish philosophical writing have consequently originated outside Ireland's history departments. One by-product of recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment has been the rediscovery of the “Molesworth Circle” by two scholars engaged in a painstaking reconstruction of Francis Hutcheson's early career in Dublin. At the other end of the century, meanwhile, some of the most exciting and ambitious attempts to conceptualize the republicanism of the United Irishmen have come from a leading historian of revolutionary France, James Livesey. His previous research on the “commercial republicanism” of Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and Brissot has suggested a new framework for understanding Irish radicals such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet and, in particular, Arthur O'Connor.

Summary 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 duree. 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.

Summary 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.

Through an extended critical engagement with John P. McCormick'sMachiavellian Democracy, this paper aims to shed light on Machiavelli's account of relations among the many and the few in theDiscourses on Livy. While we agree with McCormick that Machiavelli should not be too quickly subsumed within the republican tradition, as interpreted by the “Cambridge School,” we reject the idea that Machiavelli's central thrust is prodemocratic. By focusing on the structure and logic of Machiavelli's arguments, we show that Machiavelli was critical of the capacities of ordinary citizens to govern themselves. As a result, Machiavelli emphasized and endorsed continuous elite intervention in the political life of the mixed regime, even as he paid due attention to the people's participation in a political regime with appropriate laws and institutions. Machiavelli's political theory, as embodied in theDiscourses on Livy, challenges the transparency and equality that contemporary egalitarians and democrats embrace.

McCormick’s book engages with the theoretical and political positions discussed by the Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli about five centuries ago, and, in particular, the creation of the tribunes of the plebs. In ancient Rome, plebeian power had been institutionalised through the creation of tribunes. According to McCormick, a similar institution would offer a legitimate forum for expression to the people in modern democracies. In fact, following Machiavelli’s suggestions, this would contribute to the implementation of a new form of democracy, more respectful of the people and more eager to defend values such as freedom and independence from the influence of the powerful and the rich. In this review, Filippo Del Lucchese comments on McCormick’s book from a Marxist point of view. One of the strongest points of the book is the discussion of the opposition between democracy and republicanism. Over the last decades, the latter has in fact been absorbed into the sphere of influence of the Cambridge School, and neutralised, or at least defused its most interesting and radical aspects. McCormick’s attempt to repoliticise the Machiavellian discourse is indeed praiseworthy, yet, by mainly focusing on the ‘institutionalisation’ of popular power, McCormick fails to discern the most radical elements of Machiavelli’s thought. From this angle, the review discusses McCormick’s use of the category of ‘class’ and offers a different perspective on the revolutionary dimension.

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.

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.

In Machiavellian Democracy, John McCormick elegantly highlights the “ferocious populism” inherent in Machiavelli’s writings. McCormick distinguishes his reading from that of the Cambridge School, emphasizing that interpreting Machiavelli within the republican tradition fails to do justice to Machiavelli’s anti-elitism. Whereas republicanism both in its historical and contemporary forms is in many respects compatible with aristocratic rule and hostile to popular agency, McCormick’s reading of Machiavelli affirms the importance of institutions designed to give the people—the economic lower classes in particular—a means of keeping elites accountable and an active role in political life. The book is divided into three sections. The first is largely interpretive, focusing on arguments for popular participation in the Prince and the Discourses; the second discusses Machiavelli’s analysis of the way in which institutions structure the motivational logic of citizens and elites in Rome and Florence in particular; and the third provides a normative critique of the aristocratic impulses of even contemporary republicanism, accompanied by institutional prescriptions for challenging elite domination along Machiavellian lines. Throughout the book, McCormick’s reading of Machiavelli is both careful and bracing, a rare combination. For instance, within the first third, the discussion of Machiavelli’s relationship with the two dedicatees of the Discourses, Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti, is especially interesting. There McCormick demonstrates persuasively that Machiavelli encourages the grandi to believe that the stability of the

For nearly half a century, Quentin Skinner has been the world's foremost interpreter of Thomas Hobbes. When the contextualist mode of intellectual history now known as the “Cambridge School” was first asserting itself in the 1960s, the life and writings of John Locke were the primary topic for pioneers such as Peter Laslett and John Dunn. At that time, Hobbes was still the plaything of philosophers and political scientists, virtually all of whom wrote in an ahistorical, textual-analytic manner. Hobbes had not been the subject of serious contextual research for decades, since the foundational writings of Ferdinand Tönnies. For Skinner, he was thus an ideal subject, providing a space for original research on a major figure, and an occasion for some polemically charged methodological manifestos. Both of these purposes animated his 1965 article “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” and his 1966 article “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought”. The latter of these remains to this day one of the most widely cited scholarly articles in the fifty-year run of Cambridge'sHistorical Journal. Among other results of these early efforts was the scholarly controversy during which Howard Warrender chided Skinner for having reduced the “classic texts in political philosophy” to mere “tracts for the times”.

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.

At the heart of the problematic of colonialism lies a deceptively simply question: why did the colonized put up with their subjection? I say deceptively simple because, while there is an obvious answer on which practically all researchers are agreed-that is, European 'power'-its nature, sources, and mode of implementation have always been hotly debated. In the 1960s and 1970s, a period dominated, at least on the South Asian front, by the so-called "Cambridge School," the apparent acceptance of European rule by many or most of the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa was generally interpreted as arising from a conscious, 'free' choice on the part of collaborating social elites-such as, in India, landlords, 'princes,' Brahmin pandits, and Muslim ulema. Already privileged, these groups had the power, the leverage, and the acumen-the argument ran-to exploit the colonial compact to their advantage, which in turn gave them a 'vested interest' in its survival.' But the Cambridge School line has not weathered well. The notion that colonial subjects voluntarily and consciously entered into arrangements that permitted their subjection to European metropolitan political and

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.

This article has two main aims. First, it provides a brief account of the terms modernidad (modernity) and modernismo (modernism) in the Spanish context from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century. Second, it seeks to illustrate the way in which conceptual history is being approached in a Spanish context. It draws upon the collaborative efforts of a group of over 30 scholars who have sought to explore the political lexicon of 19th-century Spain. The article deploys the analytical categories and methodological tools associated with the followers of Begriffsgeschichte and of the Cambridge school. Our conclusion is that an examination of these two terms reveals that the emphasis upon Spanish singularity has been exaggerated and that, despite the historical backwardness of the country, Spain played an outstanding role in the creation of the language of modernity and postmodernity.

Since several years the discussions on Eduard Said's interpretation of oriental ism mark the dispute on the character and the importance of colonialism in South Asia. This has led to very interesting research on the relationship between colonial power and the production of knowledge on the colonies, notably on the ways in which indigenous institutions and traditions have been reinterpreted and thus re-formed by the British. While indigenous resistance is glorified, it nevertheless does not seem to have had much of an effect, as according to this position, both the power to interpret the world and the agency to change it re mained exclusively colonial. Challenging this all too sharp dichotomy between the omnipotent coloniser and the helpless colonised which in a strange way rejoins contemporary British images notably the Cambridge School and Chris Bayly have pointed out the many different forms of interaction, through which colonial knowledge on India was formed and reality transformed. Emphasising reciprocities and cross-fertilisa tions, Jamal Malik has recently shown that much of the 18tn and early 19th cen tury can also be read as a history of 'mutual encounters'1 between British and Indians.

Was Leo Strauss wrong about John Locke? Surely that he was has been the consensus among historians of political thought, though their reasons are sometimes at variance. The Cambridge school, influenced by the work of John Dunn, interprets Locke's work in the light of the Calvinism in his family background. Though attacked by spokesmen for the Church of England, Locke quickly gained admirers among dissenting clergy, for his psychology, his politics, and of course his program for religious toleration, and the proponents of the Calvinist interpreta tion explain why: His discourse closely tracks the theological language of his Calvinist contemporaries. Richard Ashcraft, meanwhile, sought to restore Locke's reputation as a revolutionary by investigating his role in English politics under the Restoration, albeit at the price of reducing the Two Treatises to a tract for the moment. James Tully would likewise save him from the charge of being a capitalist apologist, insisting Locke merely offered a defense of Whig landholding, with the responsibilities as well as the privileges embedded in the English law of estate. All these interpretations dismiss or disregard Strauss's account of Locke as an atheist in the mold of Hobbes and Spinoza who succeeded by his mastery of the art of esoteric writing in concealing his unbelief; as the most successful, because most prudent, proponent of the modern doctrine of natural rights, which revolutionized politics around the world; and as the theorist who prepared the way for modern capitalism by his vigorous defense of unlimited acquisition.

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.

The first step in planning a lexicon of European political and legal concepts is to decide upon how it is to be organised. Among the principal alternatives are the formats of three German reference works on the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) and the methods associated with John Pocock and Quentin Skinner. Although these German and Anglophone styles are often regarded as incompatible, on closer inspection, they turn out to be in many respects complementary, as Skinner has recently acknowledged. What would such a format look like? Is it possible to overcome the difficulties inherent in attempting a lexicon combining continental and Anglophone political and legal concepts?

We are...in a world in which power figures and reconfigures; in which human artifice must struggle with human necessities; in which notions such as justice, freedom, compassion, and autonomy, authority, legitimacy, security and force animate, constrain, and enable human beings in each and every arena within which they engage one another. Jean Bethke Elshtain In our own times we can neither endure our thoughts nor the task of rethinking them. We think restlessly within familiar frameworks to avoid thought about how our thinking is framed. William E. Gonnolly The role of language in the constitution of social and political life has long been overlooked in the academic study of international relations. The most influential theoretical approaches, those that dominate debate in U.S. political science, remain firmly wedded to a correspondence theory of truth and the "elusive quest" for a scientific understanding of the world. (1) Concerns about language and intersubjectivity are deemed irrelevant in the positivist mission to explain the pattern(s) of world politics. It is as if much of twentieth-century social theory and philosophy had never been written. Nevertheless, over the last few years, a plethora of critical voices have sought to challenge this pervasive attitude, and their work has made an "indelible impression" on the topography of the field, undermining its boundaries, questioning its questions and problematizing its practices. (2) The starting point for many of these critical approaches--which include postmodernism(s)/poststructuralism(s), most forms of feminism, and some constructivists--has been work produced in the wake of the "linguistic turn" in social and political theory. (3) This turn has followed a number of diverse routes, encompassing the universal pragmatics propounded by Habermas and Apel, the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, the ordinary language analysis of Wittgenstein and Austin, and the hermeneutics of, among others, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, in social and political theory in general, and international-relations theory in particular, much of this intellectual terrain remains under-explored. One important project is that developed by what in this article I am calling the Cambridge School (CS) of historians--in particular, by Quentin Skinner. Kari Palonen, for example, has claimed that Skinner should be regarded as one of "the few dissidents in the contemporary academic world" who concentrat e on the role of conceptual-linguistic transformation in the unfolding of history; and Charles Taylor argues that Skinner has formulated an "interesting and challenging" political theory. (4) This article outlines the Skinnerian position in relation to IR, and as such it is a partial response to Ken Booth's contention that it "is vital that students of IR give language more attention than hitherto, as words shape as well as reflect reality." (5) The CS approach has much to offer the theorist of international politics, especially through its focus on the historicity of conceptual change and its understanding of how political legitimacy is embedded in and constrained by the set of political vocabularies available at any given time. Why have the implications for political theory inherent in the CS project been largely overlooked? The CS authors, and Skinner in particular, are usually bracketed as historians, and aspects of their work that relate to political theory remain unnoticed or are assumed to refer primarily to the study of the history of ideas. (6) This characterization is a mistake, for within the arguments sketched by the CS authors can be discerned an important approach to understanding social and political life. By concentrating on conceptual change and the constitutive role played by language in shaping the normative architecture of (any given) society, we can reach a more sophisticated understanding of language in both the reproduction of social norms and conventions and consequently in the process(es) of change itself. …

In the topic of this article, it is the early modern intellectual history; it will be offered at first an overview of the approaches of the parallelism between the researches of words, pictures, and gestures, based on the author's personal experiences as a researcher of this epoch. The first examples will be severallociof English classics, John Milton, and John Locke; then it will be mentioned the significance of the methodology of the “Iconic Turn,” with the concept of “pictorial (speech) act”, and with the history of religious art. At the end of this overview it will be mentioned briefly the methodological contribution of the Cambridge school of intellectual history, and that of theGeschichtliche Grundbegriffeof Reinhart Koselleck. Second part of this article will offer a historical example from the early modern age. The first one is an analysis of several details of Thomas Hobbes’ ambivalent relationship with the antique tradition of rhetoric, and their consequences for the visual sphere. Santrauka Šio straipsnio tema – moderniųjų laikų pradžios intelektualinė istorija. Pirmoje jo dalyje pateikiama tarp mokslinių tyrinėjimų, skirtų žodžiams, vaizdams ir gestams, susiklostančių paralelių traktavimo bendroji samprata. Vienoks ar kitoks jų traktavimas priklauso nuo autoriaus, kaip toje epochoje gyvenančio tyrėjo, asmeninių patirčių. Pirmieji pavyzdžiai – tai keletas anglų klasikų, tokių kaip Johnas Miltonas ir Johnas Locke'as. Paskui pabrėžiama „vaizdinio posūkio“ metodologijos „vaizdavimo (kalbėjimo) akto“ koncepto, religinio meno istorijos svarba. Galiausiai trumpai paminimas Kembridžo mokyklos indėlis į intelektualinę istoriją ir Reinharto KoselleckoGeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Antroje straipsnio dalyje pateikiamas istorinis pavyzdys iš ankstyvosios moderniosios epochos. Pirmiausia imamasi Thomaso Hobbeso ambivalentiško santykio su antikine retorikos tradicija keleto detalių analizės, o paskui aptariama šio santykio įtaka vizualumo sričiai. Reikšminiai žodžiai:gestai,vaizdinis posūkis,retorika,kalbėjimo aktas,Thomasas Hobbesas,rašymo aktas

In considering the Cambridge School of intellectual history, we should distinguish Skinner’s conventionalism from Pocock’s contextualism whilst recognising that both of them argue that the study of a text’s linguistic context is at least necessary and perhaps sufficient to ensure understanding. This paper suggests that although “study the linguistic context of an utterance” is a valuable heuristic maxim, it is not a pre-requisite of understanding that one does so. Hence, we might shift our attention from the role of linguistic contexts in understanding a text, to the role of ideational contexts in our explanations of meanings or beliefs. The explanatory role of contexts can be unpacked in terms of traditions and dilemmas. Here the paper also considers how this approach differs from that of the Cambridge School.

A justification is offered for approaching classic works of political theory as relevant to problems that concern us. Perennial problems are shown to exist in three increasingly controversial senses. First, past authors addressed a problem which we can ponder. Second, past authors addressed a problem which authors who wrote on these authors also addressed and which we can ponder. Third, numerous authors expressed beliefs relevant to a problem which we can ponder. The errors identified by opponents of perennial problems arise from empirical misjudgements concerning the ways that different authors addressed such problems, not from the assumption that such problems exist.

The late John Burrow, one of the most stimulating promoters of the distinctively interdisciplinary enterprise that is Intellectual History, was a vital member of what has become known as the ‘Sussex School’. In exploring the resonances of his singular and richly idiosyncratic contribution, this article places his unique historical sensibility within a series of interpretative contexts, demonstrating the vitality of writings that will continue to inspire and inform scholarship in the field for decades to come. ☆ The Sussex Centre for Intellectual History Lecture delivered at the University of Sussex on 21st October, 2010. I am deeply indebted to Noel Sugimura for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the present essay with her customary sense and sensibility.

Preliminary comments: The precedents Interest in the study of social phenomena grows in strength and depth as a function of their relevance during a particular period. The crisis of the 1930s and the dreadful manifestations of unemployment definitely revived interest in the phenomenon as a problem of grand social import. Indeed, those years saw some significant achievements in regard to the subject of unemployment and its economic as well as social analysis.1 The idea that unemployment is an involuntary phenomenon, a condition imposed upon workers, whatever their willingness to work, was definitively established in those years. The spread of the works of Keynes and the Cambridge School on the one hand, and of the Marxist-oriented studies of Kalecki on the other, clarified certain significant points regarding the role of demand and investment. In the present period, many social scientists in Europe and the United States (although the country most studied is England), are engaged in exploring the social and psychological implications of unemployment.2 The battle against unemployment had not really been seriously joined in any European country - with the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries - and that effort was put off to the end of the decade by the politics of armament and public wartime spending. In fact, Keynesian suggestions of intervention in support of aggregate

A discussion of the theoretical and historical reasons why Marshall, notwithstanding the later publication of his version of marginalism with respect to Jevons, Menger and Walras, was in fact recognized as by far the most important of the founders of marginalism

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.

Unlike in Europe and the United States, where the writing of family history has become a growth industry over the past thirty years, only recently have historians of Greater Syria during the Ottoman period (1516–1917) started investigating this topic.Also referred to as the Levant, or Bilad al-Sham, Greater Syria for the purposes of this article is today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine-Israel. As of yet, there is not a single published monograph in the English language on this topic. Two useful overviews are Haim Gerber, “Anthropology and Family History: The Ottoman and Turkish Families,” Journal of Family History, 14:4 (1989), 409–21; and Judith Tucker, “The Arab Family in History,” in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, Judith Tucker, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1993), 195–207. For monographs related to family history in Greater Syria, see Linda Schatkowski-Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1985); and Annelies Moors, Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian Experiences: 1920–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Almost two years ago, Margaret L. Meriwether kindly shared with me the rough draft of her book manuscript, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840 (forthcoming, University of Texas Press), which promises to be a pioneering contribution to this topic. Two important studies on family history in the Middle East outside Greater Syria—the first following the demographic approach of the Cambridge School and the second much more in the tradition of historical anthropology—are Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Martha Mundy, Domestic Government: Kinship, Community and Policy in North Yemen (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995). Of course, Jack Goody has written extensively on family history in the Middle East from a comparative perspective. See, for example, chapters one and two of his book, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Finally, some of the issues raised in this article were subjected to careful scrutiny by Vanessa Maher, Women and Property in Morocco: Their Changing Role in Relation to the Process of Social Stratification (Cambridge, 1974). Not surprisingly, this uncharted landscape is covered by a thick fog of generalizations about the “traditional Arab family.”It is perhaps not a coincidence that the equally glaring absence of family history in the field of South Asian Studies is also combined with ubiquitous generalizations about the “traditional Hindu joint family.” Indeed, Indian society, like Arab society, is said to begin with the family; but the Indian family, like the Arab family, is central to novels not to histories. Nor is it surprising that while the number of articles on the Arab and Indian families in the last twenty-odd volumes of the Journal of Family History are in the single digits, there is a plethora of studies on women's history. Perhaps, as Louise Tilly suggests, this is due to the fact that women's history is, in many ways, a movement history; while the family has long been viewed as the fundamental site of male oppression (“Women's History and Family History: Fruitful Collaboration or Missed Connection?,” Journal of Family History, 12:1–3 [1987], 303–15). That I make these comparative assertions with some confidence is due to the insightful and thorough bibliographical research of Ian Petrie, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, on the Indian family. Usually defined as a patrilineal, patrilocal, extended social unit, this family type is assumed to have remained the norm well into the twentieth century.Raphael Patai's definition is the one cited most often (Society, Culture, and Change in the Middle East, 3rd ed. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971], 21). For critiques of this view, see Mundy's erudite analysis in Domestic Governments, 89–92. See also the articles by Gerber and Tucker cited in note 1.

Capital theory of the Cambridge School has, during the last three decades, cast doubts on the neoclassical methods of determining prices. The Sraffa analysis, on the one hand, and Neumann analysis, on the other, independently applied to the determination of properties of a Robinsonian golden age, supplied alternative modes of determining prices. The questions is often asked as to why so much stress is put on correct valuation of capital when the real problem is correct allocation of resources to industry. The author examines the system whereby the solution of the Sraffa-Neumann input-output system for prices yields corresponding equations which determine allocations as the dual. Hence, he concludes that unless the system is so posed as to give the correct price equations, it cannot give the correct allocations equations. Thus the insistence on correct theory of valuation of capital stems from a desire to achieve an optimal allocation vector for any planned economy, especially for a mixed economy where a private sector exists and follows price signals.

This article has two main aims. First, it provides a brief account of the terms modernidad (modernity) and modernismo (modernism) in the Spanish context from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century. Second, it seeks to illustrate the way in which conceptual history is being approached in a Spanish context. It draws upon the collaborative efforts of a group of over 30 scholars who have sought to explore the political lexicon of 19th-century Spain. The article deploys the analytical categories and methodological tools associated with the followers of Begriffsgeschichte and of the Cambridge school. Our conclusion is that an examination of these two terms reveals that the emphasis upon Spanish singularity has been exaggerated and that, despite the historical backwardness of the country, Spain played an outstanding role in the creation of the language of modernity and postmodernity. key words: Cambridge school, conceptual history, Jose Ortega y Gasset, modernity, 19th-century Spain The aim of this article is twofold. First, it attempts to give a brief account of the semantic evolution of the terms modernidad (modernity) and modernismo (modernism) in the Spanish context from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century. But, second, we would like this article to be seen as an illustration of our particular way of approaching the study of conceptual history. In fact

H ISTORIANS OF SOUTH ASIA have long been interested in the interplay of politics and religion-and rightly so, for the recent history of the Subcontinent is strewn with the debris of sectarian conflict. Nevertheless, until recently few scholars have attempted to analyze their interaction systematically or in depth.' Thus, in the case of the Pakistan movement it is widely accepted that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was able to carry the day because the masses responded to his cry of "Islam in danger!" Maybe so; but the means by which the message was disseminated and the precise nature of its appeal to the Muslim community have yet to be determined. While Jinnah himself remains an enigma, newly published studies of Muslim movements in Kerala, Bombay, Bengal and Punjab2 have underlined the absurdity of Jinnah's claim that the Indian Muslims constituted a single, homogeneous "nation" welded together by a congruent set of beliefs and customs and galvanised by a common antipathy to the Congress. Viewed in local terms, "Muslim fanaticism" seems to have been as much a product of economic hardship and millenarian aspirations as an expression of religious zeal per se. Was religion, then, only a cloak for other concerns? Several British historians associated with the so-called "Cambridge school" have argued forcefully in this vein. Writing about Allahabad between 1880 and 1920, Christopher Bayly concludes that "religious attributions were often banners under which different economic and social groups organised whose motives had little to do