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

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

Some very recent “states of the field” of the history of political thought are rich in valuable information and raise many considerations. As often happens, though, rather than dwelling on what is shared, perhaps it could be more fruitful to reason in dialogue with the authors on how their reflection surprises or perplexes. In order to avoid unconscious ideological trends, the main issues to debate seem to be the idea of a role for the history of political thinking, the global perspective, the meaning of context, the relationship between the history of political thought and political theory and, mainly, the concept of scholar’s interest.

An introduction to the special issue on Hobbes and Locke: Meaning, Method, Modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the relationship between paradigms of explication and the practice of conceptual engineering. It defends three interrelated claims: First, the predominant functionalist attitude in the present debate on conceptual engineering is due to its roots in Carnapian explication, which identifies the explicandum with a precursor concept. Second, alternative metaphysical paradigms of explication locate the explicandum in a part of a concept-independent reality ('field explication', as I will call it). Third, field explication may be a better paradigm than Carnapian functionalism for certain instances of socio-political conceptual engineering. In these instances, we adjust our concepts to more adequately capture differences in our concept-independent (felt) reality. To demonstrate this, I will contrast the metaphysical to the functionalist paradigm concerning the example of Heimat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Copyright of International Journal of New Economics & Social Sciences (IJONESS) is the property of International Institute of Innovation Science-Education-Development in Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Scienza & Politica is the property of University of Bologna, Department of Political & Social Sciences Alma Mater Studiorum and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The case of the British minimum wage illustrates the interplay of ideas and interests in the making of labour legislation. In the 1980s, the pragmatic and data-driven approach of the Cambridge School, associated with the Department of Applied Economics (DAE), advanced a case for the minimum wage which combined fairness and efficiency justifications. Through collaboration with trade unions and think tanks, the argument was mobilized into an activistled campaign which changed political perceptions of the minimum wage. During the 1990s the campaign looked to have failed, as a more conventional economics informed the passage of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998. In the long run, however, the case made by the Cambridge School has endured, to inform today's global movement for a living wage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2020, Melvin Richter, one of the founders of international, conceptual history passed away. This sad occasion makes it timely in our journal to reflect on the process that turned national projects within conceptual and intellectual history into an international and transnational enterprise. The text that follows—published in two parts, here and in the next issue—takes a closer look at the intellectual processes that led up to the founding meeting of the association behind our journal, the History of Concepts Group. It follows in the footsteps of Melvin Richter to examine the different encounters, debates and protagonists in the story of international, conceptual history. The text traces the different approaches that were brought to the fore and particularly looks at Melvin Richter's efforts to bridge between an Anglophone tradition of intellectual history and a German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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.

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

R. G. Collingwood is mostly remembered for his theory that historical understanding consists in re-enacting the thoughts of the historical figure whom one is studying. His first recognizable expression of this view followed from an argument about the emptiness of psychological interpretations of religion, and throughout his career Collingwood offered history as re-enactment as an alternative to psychology. Over time, his argument that the psychology of religion could not be relevant to the veracity of religious beliefs was supplanted by the argument that psychology is self-undermining because the psychologist's procedure of attributing beliefs to blind psychic needs could apply just as easily to the psychologist him- or herself. As an alternative to what he took to be the self-defeating psychological position, Collingwood put forward the study of the development of beliefs as the motivations for actions, which led him to his views that "all history is the history of thought" and that, in order to understand an historical event, we must mentally re-enact the thoughts that stood behind it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article justifies 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 misjudgments concerning the ways that different authors addressed such problems, not from the assumption that such problems exist.

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

Copyright of Cuestiones Teológicas is the property of Cuestiones Teologicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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

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

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

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