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The Ideas in Context series has served the Enlightenment well. Roughly a quarter of the first hundred books in the series deal (at least in part) with the period, including studies of Locke (Tully, Carey, Dawson), Rousseau (Rosenblatt), Smith (Forman-Barzilai), Mandeville (Goldsmith and Hundert), Thomasius (Hunter), the reception of Hobbes (Parkin), and a nowclassic account of the ideological origins of the French Revolution (Baker).1 Of no less significance are broader-gauged examinations of the "common good" (Miller), "luxury" (Berry), and "empire" (Brown, Armitage), as well as explorations of the Enlightenment's relationship to Rational Dissenters (Haakonssen) and Judaism (Sutcliffe) and its debts to theories of natural law (Hochstrasser and Hunter).2 The nexus of commerce, politics, and history has also been a major concern of the series (Pocock, Tribe, Winch, Force, Robertson).3 But a tally of this sort only begins to register the significance of Ideas in Context for studies of the Enlightenment. As might be expected from a series ably shepherded by Quentin Skinner, significant methodological questions have also come to the fore.According to the statement that stands at the front of each volume, the goal of the series is to trace "the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines" by setting the "procedures, aims, and vocabularies" generated by these traditions and disciplines in the context of the "ideas and institutions" in which they developed. If the way in which this setting of ideas in contexts was to be effected might not have been entirely clear from the programmatic essay in the inaugural volume (though jointly signed by Skinner, Jerome Schneewind, and Richard Rorty, it was, as Richard Fisher has recently explained, "largely written" by Rorty and "tonally rather different to much of what has followed"),4 such matters would be clarified considerably by the second volume in the series, J. G. A. Pocock's Virtue, Commerce, and History. Reviewing recent developments in the history of political thought, Pocock observed that the "history of thought (and even more sharply 'of ideas')" was being supplanted by a "history of speech" or a "history of discourse."5 An overview of what such a history might look like quickly followed: The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, a volume tracing the various discourses in which political thought had been conducted from the Renaissance to the dawn of the nineteenth century.6 In his contribution to the volume, Pocock observed that the ability to say anything presupposed "a language to say it in," which suggested that the relationship of ideas to contexts might be conceived along the lines of that between parole and langue.7 While the volumes that followed were not limited to products of what came to be called the "Cambridge School" (and while not all of those associated with the "Cambridge School" embraced the analogy Pocock was proposing), a concern with the discursive context in which arguments were conducted has implications for accounts of the Enlightenment."Enlightenment" can be used both to designate a particular historical period (i.e., "the Enlightenment") and to refer to a process (i.e., "enlightenment") that, though associated with certain historical periods, is captive to none of them. Drawing out the implications of the "history of discourse" that Pocock, Skinner, and their colleagues were developing, "the Enlightenment"-as a discursive context in which things could be said (and, hence, done)-might be seen as a sort of langue, while "enlightenment" might be understood as encompassing a variety of activities, the bulk of them presumably occurring within the discursive context known as "the Enlightenment." Thinking about the Enlightenment in this way stands in sharp contrast both to Ernst Cassirer's attempt to grasp "its conceptual origins" and "underlying principle" and to Peter Gay's identification of it with the "little flock of philo sop he s'''' who, though adhering to no single party line, nevertheless constituted the "party of humanity. …

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.

Our main purpose is to understand the articulations between linguistic turn and ethical-political turn in contemporany intelectual history trough analysis of the main theoretical and methodological contributions brought by Quentin Skinner and Paul Ricoeur. After investigating each view’s comprehension about the question of meaning and texts interpretations, we conclude our article with an approach of ethical implications of the study of intelecutal history. Nosso objetivo central é compreender as articulações entre o giro linguísitco e o giro ético-político na história intelectual contemporânea por meio de análises dos principais aportes teórico-metodológicos trazidos pela Escola de Cambridge com Quentin Skinner e pela Hermenêutica com Paul Ricoeur. Após investigar a compreensão de cada vertente sobre a questão do sentido e da interpretação dos textos, terminamos nosso artigo com uma abordagem das implicações éticas do estudo da história intelectual.

This essay traces the evolution of trends in the historiography on South Asia over the past quarter-century, focusing on the trans-Atlantic axis. The rise and transformation of subaltern studies from the early 1980s, it is argued, posed a major challenge to the institutional organization of South Asian history, leading eventually in turn to the redefinition of a «Cambridge School» quite different from that which had existed in the 1970s. Furthermore, the effects of economic liberalization in India and the growing importance of a South Asian diaspora in the US, have led to an entirely new market situation. The essay is thus a participant-observer’s attempt to relate questions of epistemology to an application of the model of duopoly associated with analysts such as Cournot. RésuméCet essai a pour but de tracer l’évolution des grandes tendances dans l’historiographie sur l’Asie du Sud au cours du quart de siècle passé, se concentrant sur l’axe transatlantique. L’élévation et la transformation des subaltern studies depuis le début des années 1980 a posé un défi important à l’organisation institutionnelle de l’histoire indienne, conduisant par la suite à la redéfinition d’une Cambridge School très différente de ce qui avait existé dans les années 1970. En outre, les effets de la libéralisation économique en Inde et l’importance croissante d’une diaspora indienne aux USA ont entraîné une nouvelle situation du marché. L’essai est ainsi écrit par un participant-observateur, et la tentative est de mettre en rapport des questions épistémologiques à une application du modèle du duopole associé aux analystes tels que Cournot.

Robert (Bob) Rowthorn has worked throughout his career as a political economist, addressing key questions in both economic and social policy, following a fine old Cambridge tradition. Rowthorn is a gifted mathematician and a distinguished econometrician, but has used these skills to examine practical policy questions rather than to simply display technical prowess in abstruse areas of theory. He has considered a very wide range of issues such as inflation, unemployment, regional development both globally and within the UK, marriage, immigration, and the emergence of trust and altruism. One of the key themes of the Cambridge School is the emphasis which it has placed on the distribution of income between labour and capital, and this has been the inspiration for Rowthorn’s major works on macroeconomics.

Changes in the English educational system have brought classical subjects to the edge of extinction in state schools. The Cambridge School Classics Project (CSCP) has therefore begun to explore the practicalities of providing Latin teaching over the Internet. This paper examines the decline in Latin provision in English state schools before discussing practical, technical, and pedagogical issues arising from a small-scale, one-year project in which two state schools ran Latin classes without Latin specialists but with the support of by Web-based electronic resources and e-mail tutors. Consideration is then given to different electronic resources currently under development to enhance the study of Latin.

Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of intellectual history., Após décadas de aversão e esquecimento, historiadores de todos os quadrantes começam a regressar aos estudos de grande escala temporal. Há até sinais de que os historiadores intelectuais estão a retomar a abordagem de longa duração. Quais serão as razões para este ressurgimento da história intelectual de grande alcance e de que modo pode ela tornar-se metodologicamente robusta e, ao mesmo tempo, historicamente convincente? Este artigo propõe um modelo de história transtemporal baseado num contextualismo seriado para criar uma «história nas ideias» («history in ideas») que englobe séculos ou até milénios. Alguns exemplos-chave são retirados de trabalhos em desenvolvimento focados em ideias sobre a guerra civil vista desde a Roma antiga até à atualidade. O artigo conclui com uma breve reflexão sobre o impacto potencial das humanidades digitais na prática da história intelectual.

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

With the release of Treasury papers from the 1970s under the 30-year rule we have a much more complete picture of the dispute in the 1970s between the Treasury and the Cambridge Economic Policy Group (CEPG), especially given the role of three Cambridge economists--Nicholas Kaldor, Wynne Godley and Francis Cripps--as ministerial advisers at the time. The records show some eventual closing of the gap between the Treasury and the CEPG regarding the latter's proposition of stable private-sector NAFA (where NAFA stands for net acquisition of private sector assets) and its implications for demand management and the balance of payments. In contrast, the initial differences on counterinflation policy and, above all, on import controls versus free trade were wider at the end of the decade than at the start of it. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

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.

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.

Abstract This essay takes up the fundamental question of the proper place of history in the study of political thought through critical engagement with Mark Bevir’s seminal work, The Logic of the History of Ideas. While I accept the claim of Bevir, as well as of other exponents of the so-called “Cambridge School,” that there is a conceptual difference between historical and non-historical modes of reading past works of political philosophy, I resist the suggestion that this conceptual differentiation itself justifies the specialization, among practicing intellectuals, between historians of ideas and others who read political-philosophical texts non-historically. Over and against the figure of the historian of ideas, who interprets political thought only in the manner of a historian, I defend the ideal of the pupil, who in studying past traditions of political thought also seeks to extend and modify them in light of contemporary problems and concerns. Against Bevir, I argue that the mixture of historical and non-historical modes of learning, in the manner of the pupil, need not do damage to the historian of ideas’ commitment to scholarship that is non-anachronistic, objective, and non-indeterminate.

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.

Kevin D. Murphy reexamines the introduction of European modern architecture in New England during the late 1920s and 1930s. Emphasizing the importance of regional vernacular forms to the reformulation and popularization of modernism, The Vernacular Moment: Eleanor Raymond, Walter Gropius, and New England Modernism between the Wars also highlights Raymond's pioneering role in this process. A decade before Gropius associated modernism with New England's vernacular building tradition in the choice of materials for his own house in Lincoln, Massachusetts (1938), the design of the Cambridge School of Architecture (1928), to which Raymond contributed, had brought together modernism with both industrial and domestic vernacular idioms. Closely analyzing the architecture and written statements of Gropius and Raymond, the article explores how the architects grounded their modernism in tradition and created well-publicized buildings that served their pedagogic purposes.

(Reviewing: Great Thinker in Economics, Series Editor, A. P. Thirlwall, selection consisting of P. Groenewegen, Alfred Marshall, 2007; P. Davidson, John Maynard Keynes, 2007, 2009; G. Fletcher, Dennis Robertson, 2008; A. Roncaglia, Piero Sraffa, 2009; G. C. Harcourt and P. Kerr, Joan Robinson, 2009; J. E. King, Nicholas Kaldor, 2009, Palgrave Macmillan) Six volumes in the Great Thinker in Economics Series were chosen by the Editors for this review, which focuses on The Cambridge School of Economics, so very different from the mainstream theory of general economic equilibrium which gives formal expression to Lionel Robbins' famous definition of the subject as the allocation of scarce means among alternative uses. In recognition of a distinct Cambridge School, the authors of these volumes present a variety of arguments within which three overlapping themes can be discerned: the relationship between ethics and economics; the role of stocks and flows in economic analysis; and the epistemic problem surrounding the role of creativity, which has eluded the skills of formalists. The once pervasive influence of Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Dennis Robertson, Piero Sraffa, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor can only be recovered with some such set of general themes in mind. Copyright The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Contextualization has become the reigning shibboleth of historical analysis, especially for intellectual and cultural history. Although acknowledging the achievements of the Cambridge School of historians, led by Quentin Skinner, who have done so much to promote awareness of the need to situate texts in their original illocutionary contexts, this essays explores two critical responses. The first focuses on challenges to contemporary historians to establish the relevant explanatory contexts without bringing to bear current perspectives and knowledge of developments after the original period. The second turns to the events themselves and draws on recent French theory, in particular the phenomenological work of Claude Romano, to question whether all historical phenomena can be understood by situating them in their generative contexts.

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

The article introduces a discussion on approaches to the history of political thought based on a panel at the ECPR General Conference in Potsdam, 2009. After reconstructing the three classic approaches, the Cambridge School, the ‘Begriffsgeschichte’, and Foucault's Genealogy as well as more recent developments in the field, the authors outline a scheme for further methodological and comparative research. They also emphasise the importance of historical approaches for political theory and political science.

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”.

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.

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...

At the heart of the academic case for ‘thick description’ lies the ambiguous meaning of a physical movement—a boy ‘rapidly contracting his right eyelid’. A simple observation (it is said) will not disclose the meaning of the signal—a twitch, a wink, or a parody of somebody’s conspiratorial wink might all appear the same. Only an ethnographic analysis will disclose the meaning, or meanings, of this movement to those at the scene. Of course, for almost all historians the kind of ethnographic analysis invited by this point of departure is impossible but the thought has been influential in the reading of particular texts. In Darnton’s celebrated essay on the massacre of cats in Paris in the 1730s, for example, a similar methodological move is made: ‘when you realise that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it’. The inexplicit or unstated meaning of action or utterance is what discloses the cultural frame to the observer; or, close analysis of the explicit reveals the conceptual underpinnings which make it seem possible, or natural, for participants. Here there is, perhaps, a connection with the Cambridge school of intellectual history, informed by Austin’s writing on speech acts and intent on recovering the ‘illocutionary force’ of particular texts through thorough contextualization, including an attention to what is not said, or to the particular choice made among available means of expression. The oft-remarked convergence of social, political, and cultural history has as a central concern the importance of the implicit and

Journal of the Philosophy of History 3 (2009) 211–224 brill.nl/jph Contextualism: From Modernist Method to Post-analytic Historicism? 1 Mark Bevir University of California, Berkeley mbevir@berkeley.edu Abstract This article provides a critical history of the Cambridge School of intellectual his- tory. Laslett’s work on Locke appeared to vindicate modernist historicism. Laslett shunned the broad narratives of romantic developmental historicists. He relied on bibliographies, unpublished manuscripts, and other evidence to establish atom- ized facts and thus textual interpretations. Pocock and Skinner’s theories defended modernist historicism. They argued historians should situate texts in contexts and prove interpretations correct by using modernist methods to establish empirical facts. They attacked approaches that read authors as contributing to perennial debates or aiming at a coherent metaphysics. I argue we should reject modernist historicism with its methodological focus; we should adopt a post-analytic his- toricism focused on philosophical issues arising from analyses of the human sci- ences as studying actions by attributing meanings to actors and showing how these meanings fit into larger webs of belief. Keywords Cambridge School, contextualism, historicism, modernism, Pocock, Skinner “During the last ten years”, wrote J. G. A. Pocock in 1972, “scholars inter- ested in the study of systems of political thought have had the experience Most of the papers in this special issue were originally presented under the auspices of the Society for the Philosophy of History at the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) in Pasadena in 2008. For a more detailed version of my arguments in this paper see M. Bevir, “The Contextual Approach” in G. Klosko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). DOI: 10.1163/187226309X461506 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009

Henry Sidgwick's loss of religious faith is central to understanding the origins of the Cambridge school of welfare economics. The most prominent “public” manifestation of this loss and its impact on Sidgwick's thought was his Methods of Ethics, which was at once the capstone work of classical utilitarianism, cementing Sidgwick's place as one of the great philosophers of ethics during the Victorian period, and the source of his deep-seated need for the very religion to which he himself could no longer subscribe. Sidgwick's studies in political economy carried this ethical perspective into the economic realm, though the major impact came via his influence on A. C. Pigou, whose welfare analysis was very much a restatement of the Sidgwickian view, but undertaken with Marshallian analytical underpinnings. This article discusses Sidgwick's crisis of faith and his subsequent attempt to devise an ethical basis for social life that was divorced from religious concerns yet consistent with his own more general theistic stance. It also shows how the results of this search affected Sidgwick's work in economics and, ultimately, the Cambridge welfare tradition.

This paper investigates the origin and evolution of the concept of the industrial district. The idea of industrial district is quite spread in modern industrial economics and in business studies, with a variety of meanings and typologies. Indeed the true first original conceptualisation dates back to Alfred Marshall and the economists of the so-called Cambridge School. Quite often the concept of industrial district is considered as synonymous of agglomeration, localisation, and clustering. But, according to the meaning given originally by Marshall, these processes of industry “territorialisation” are quite different from the more “compound localisation” that is the Marshallian industrial district. Therefore, the aim of our contribution is focused on disentangling its original meaning from other subsequent interpretations, referring particularly to the debate on this subject arisen among the economists of the Cambridge School in the early fifties of the XX century.

This essay traces the evolution of trends in the historiography on South Asia over the past quarter-century, focusing on the trans-Atlantic axis. The rise and transformation of subaltern studies from the early 1980s, it is argued, posed a major challenge to the institutional organization of South Asian history, leading eventually in turn to the redefinition of a «Cambridge School» quite different from that which had existed in the 1970s. Furthermore, the effects of economic liberalization in India and the growing importance of a South Asian diaspora in the US, have led to an entirely new market situation. The essay is thus a participant-observer’s attempt to relate questions of epistemology to an application of the model of duopoly associated with analysts such as Cournot.

When Luigi Pasinetti arrived in Cambridge as a research student, it was the proud citadel from which Keynesian economics had conquered the world. Cambridge economics was alive and well in the hands...

Luigi Pasinetti and I were PhD students together in Cambridge in the 1950s. We met informally to discuss Joan Robinson’s magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital (1956), which she called ‘my big book’. Luigi was way ahead of me in his understanding of the intricacies of her analysis of, for example, Wicksell effects, the Ruth Cohen curiosum, and so on, but we were at one in our admiration of her overall performance in the book. (It was published when she was the same age as Keynes was when he published The General Theory.) Subsequently we were colleagues in the Cambridge Faculty in the 1960s. I read some of Luigi’s papers then in draft and I have continued to do so in subsequent years when I was in Australia and then back in Cambridge while he returned full time to Italy. He, in turn, was very kind to me, especially with his detailed, useful comments on certain key sections of my 1972 book on capital theory. Mauro Baranzini and I much enjoyed preparing the Festschrift volume for Luigi’s sixtieth birthday (Baranzini and Harcourt, 1993). (We started five years before his birthday and presented it to him three years after, vaguely right even if precisely wrong.)

Право. Экономика. Психология. - 2016. - № 2. - С. 40-43. - Библиогр.: с. 43 (4 назв.) ., Целью статьи является сравнение логических достоинств концепций издержек производства в названных школах в контексте апологии рыночной экономики. = The purpose of the proposed study is to compare the logical merits of the concepts of production costs at these schools in the context of the apology of the market 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

The Cambridge school of animal morphology dominated British zoology in the late nineteenth century. Historians have argued that they were very successful until the death of their leader F. M. Balfour in 1882, when the school all but died with him. This paper argues that their initial success came about because their work fitted well with the university in the 1870s and 1880s. They attempted to trace evolutionary trees by studying individual development. To do this they needed access to species they considered primitive. Balfour made use of his social networks to aid the school and to collect the specimens they needed for their work. The school has been portrayed as failing in the 1890s when students rejected dry laboratory-bound studies. However, a new generation of researchers who followed Balfour had to travel extensively if they were to obtain the organisms they needed. International travel was popular amongst zoologists and the Cambridge school developed their own extensive networks. A new breed of adventurer–zoologists arose, but because of the school's tenuous position within the university they were unable to equal Balfour's success.

Jamie C. Sergeant, Suzanne M. M. Verstappen, Catharine Morgan, Robert N. Luben, Amit Bhaniani, Serena Anuj, RA-MAP consortium, Alex J. MacGregor, Nick Wareham, Deborah P. M. Symmons, Kay-Tee Khaw and Ian N. Bruce Arthritis Research UK Centre for Epidemiology, Centre for Musculoskeletal Research, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, University of Manchester, NIHR Manchester Musculoskeletal Biomedical Research Unit, Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, Cambridge and Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

In recent years a group of researchers at Cambridge (UK) have (re)introduced conceptions of open and closed systems into economics. In doing so they have employed these categories in ways that, in my assessment, both facilitate a significant critique of current disciplinary practices and also point to more fruitful ways of proceeding. In an issue of this journal, Andrew Mearman has advanced three criticisms of the Cambridge position which, if valid, would seriously undermine this assessment. Below I defend the Cambridge position against Mearman's criticisms.

There have been strong ties between the Cambridge Journal of Economics (CJE) and the Cambridge School of Keynesian Economics, from the very beginning. In this paper, the author investigates the environment that saw the birth of the CJE at Cambridge (UK), in 1977, and the relationship that linked it to the direct pupils of Keynes. A critical question is explicitly examined: why didn't the 'Keynesian revolution' succeed in becoming a permanent winning paradigm? Some behavioural mistakes of the members of the Keynesian School may explain this lack of success, but only to a certain extent. In any case, there were and there still are remedies too. But what we are inheriting is a unique set of analytical building blocks (the paper lists eight of them) that makes this School of economics a viable (and in some directions definitely superior) alternative to mainstream economics. Admittedly, there is some important work still to be done. The paper highlights the need for a two-stage approach, addressing pure theory and extensive institutional analysis. It is argued that a combination of the two would strengthen the coherence of the theoretical foundations, and at the same time would provide a fruitful extension of economic analysis to empirical, institutional and economic dynamics investigations. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

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.

It was my favorite philosopher, R. G. Collingwood, who wrote somewhere that "all history is the history of ideas." I think that he is right, as I shall try to explain, but I should like also to see just how far the converse is also true, that all the history of ideas is history. Why should these apparently tautological notions matter? Because, in a word, some historians practice their craft without much regard for ideas, and some intellectual historians practice their craft without much regard for the methods of ordinary history. In either case I think that that is too bad.Perhaps I should make clear that my target is not so much those who underestimate or dismiss the value of knowing about the past when they write about the present state of things. My target rather is all those who do believe in the value of history in their present pursuits and employ it in their work but who take for granted, or sometimes misconstrue, the nature of the historiography that I believe must underlie their assertions. So I shall overlook for now those sometimes very sophisticated people who mistakenly deny that there is any point or possibility in distinguishing history from fiction, and I shall concentrate instead on a more elusive but more important target, namely, all those who practice intellectual history without much regard for the stringent historiographical conditions which must, I believe, regulate their activities.I have already had a crack at this in a previous essay where I tried to amend the famous manifesto of that distinguished historian of political thought, Quentin Skinner, in his "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."1 Skinner did a wonderful job in pleading for the value of history to the study of political thought and in showing what could go wrong in its misuse, but he neglected, so I thought, just how to put it right. I tried to show how in interpreting and using such texts as Machiavelli's Prince, or Thomas More's Utopia, it was first neeessary to fix them in the situation of their composition, before anything else could be done. Skinner saw only one part of this; he accepted the necessity of recovering what he called their "linguistic" context, but he pretty much overlooked (in his theoretical pronouncements anyway) everything else in the author's situation. I tried to show that before one could fix Thomas More (for example) in intellectual history, one had first to address the problem of what he was up to when he wrote Utopia, and that that could not be done on the evidence of the text alone or even in the context of previous texts that seemed to address the same subject. Was the Utopia a serious program of reform to be taken literally in its pronouncements? Or was it merely a criticism of contemporary life? Or was it perhaps only a humanist entertainment, or joke? All these interpretations have, among others, been offered as interpretative possibilities, so that it looks as though the problem of intention must first be resolved, if we want to discover the correct meaning of the original. And so I indicated how this might be done (using some of the suggestions of J. H. Hexter)2 by recalling the circumstances of More's actual life and the political situation at the time of the composition-by the work that I have called "ordinary history." Skinner read my essay and responded eventually; he thought I had missed the point of his essay; while I, of course, thought he had missed the point of mine.3Skinner has gone on to a most successful career describing the history of early modern political thought, joined by colleagues like J. G. A. Pocock and by students in what has sometimes been called the Cambridge school, arguing, I think correctly, "that political theory and philosophy are to be understood as speech acts performed in history," but insisting, I think too one-sidedly, that that history (the context) must be the language of some "ongoing discourse."4 Skinner believes that the first task of the intellectual historian is to recover that discourse, while I shall argue that establishing the discourse must itself rest on a prior activity: recovering the meaning and intention of each of the many speech acts that constitute the discourse, by first placing each in its own situation-and by conceiving of ideas as the result of a process of thinking, not merely as a set of conclusions. …

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.