Inspired by the work of intellectual historian J. G. A. Pocock, this 1993 collection explores the political ideologies of early modern Britain.

Contemporary philosophers often purport to ‘borrow’ or ‘refute’ claims made by past philosophers. In doing so they contravene a contextualist methodological prohibition once defended by Quentin Skinner in his seminal paper “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”. Skinner's methodology has been much debated by theorists of textual meaning and interpretation, and yet the precise nature of the logical path from his premises to his prohibitory conclusion remains elusive. This paper seeks to refute two of the (...) most promising variants of an argument for his methodological prohibition on ‘refutation’, one of which draws on his appeal to Wittgenstein's conception of ‘meaning as use’, and the other of which draws on his appeal to speech act theory. (shrink)

This is a volume of new essays introducing the most influential developments in social and political theory over the last thirty years. In that period empiricism and the positivist ideal of the unification of science have been undermined and transformed by the impact of different, frequently Continental, traditions of thought. The introduction charts these charges and each of the contributors provides a brief and lucid account of the thought of one major figure or school which have helped to bring about (...) these changes. Those discussed include Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Kuhn, Levi-Strauss, Rawls and the Annales historians. Each essay has suggestions for further reading and a useful general bibliography is provided at the end of the volume. (shrink)

This major new work from Quentin Skinner presents a fundamental reappraisal of the political theory of Hobbes. Using, for the first time, the full range of manuscript as well as printed sources, it documents an entirely new view of Hobbes 's intellectual development, and re-examines the shift from a humanist to a scientific culture in European moral and political thought. By examining Hobbes 's philosophy against the background of his humanist education, Professor Skinner rescues this most (...) difficult and challenging of political philosophers from the intellectual isolation in which he is so often discussed. This book presents a splendid exemplification of the 'Cambridge' contextual approach to the study of intellectual history with which Professor Skinner himself is especially associated. It will be of interest and importance to a wide range of scholars in history, philosophy, politics, and literary theory. (shrink)

This paper concentrates on three connected features of Taylor's argument. I begin by considering his historical sections on the formation of the modern identity, raising some doubts about the focus of his discussion and offering some specific criticisms in the case of Locke and Rousseau. Next I examine Taylor's list of the moral imperatives allegedly felt with particular force in the contemporary world. I question the extent to which the values listed by Taylor are genuinely shared, and point to a (...) range of criticisms put forward by conservatives, Marxists, feminists, and other opponents of liberalism, all of whose doubts Taylor appears to underestimate. Finally, I address Taylor's underlying claim that a religious dimension is indispensable if our highest human potentialities are to be realized, and conclude with a critique of his theistic arguments. (shrink)

The first of three volumes of essays by Quentin Skinner, one of the world's leading intellectual historians. This collection includes some of his most important philosophical and methodological statements written over the past four decades, each carefully revised for publication in this form. In a series of seminal essays Professor Skinner sets forth the intellectual principles that inform his work. Writing as a practising historian, he considers the theoretical difficulties inherent in the pursuit of knowledge and (...) interpretation, and elucidates the methodology which finds its expression in his two successive volumes. All of Professor Skinner's work is characterised by philosophical power, limpid clarity, and elegance of exposition; these essays, many of which are now recognised classics, provide a fascinating and convenient digest of the development of his thought. (shrink)

This book is an inter-disciplinary volume based on collaborative research in the humanities and social sciences that explores the benefits of historical understanding in leading disciplines, including History, Politics, Literature, Economics, Anthropology, Law, Sociology, and Philosophy.

The article examines Quentin Skinner's influential interpretation of Machiavelli's views on liberty, and the sharp divergence between his methodological ideas and his actual practice. The paper explores how Skinner's political ideals directed his interpretation against his own methodological precepts, to offer a basis for a ‘revival’ of republican theory. Skinner's reinterpretation of Machiavelli as a theorist of negative liberty is examined, and refuted. The article analyses Skinner's claim about liberty as the key political value for (...) Machiavelli, and demonstrates that liberty is secondary to empire on the list of Machiavelli's priorities. Skinner's vocabulary and efforts to tone down or ignore Machiavelli's more aggressive ideas are closely examined. The analysis offered in the article, it is suggested, has wider implications, showing the difficulty of applying contextualism in practice, by the very founder of this approach in the history of ideas. (shrink)

Freedom, today perceived simply as a human right, was a continually contested idea in the early modern period. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe an international group of scholars explore the richness, diversity and complexity of thinking about freedom in the shaping of modernity. Volume 1 examines debates about religious and constitutional liberties, as well as exploring the tensions between free will and divine omnipotence across a continent of proliferating religious denominations. Volume 2 considers free persons and free states, (...) examining differing views about freedom of thought and action and their relations to conceptions of citizenship. Debates about freedom have been fundamental to the construction of modern Europe, but represent a part of our intellectual heritage that is rarely examined in depth. These volumes provide materials for thinking in fresh ways not merely about the concept of freedom, but how it has come to be understood in our own time. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and medicine, (...) truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

Since the late 1960s Quentin Skinner has defended a highly influential form of linguistic contextualism for the history of ideas, originally devised in opposition to established methodological orthodoxies like the `great text' tradition and a mainly Marxist epiphenomenalism. In 2002, he published Regarding Method, a collection of his revised methodological essays that provides a uniquely systematic expression of his contextualist philosophy of history. Skinner's most arresting theoretical contention in that work remains his well-known claim that past works (...) of political theory cannot be read as contributions to `perennial' debates but must instead be understood as particularistic, ideological speech acts. In this article I argue that he fails to justify these claims and that there is actually nothing wrong at all with (where appropriate) treating past works of political theory as engaged in perennial philosophical debates. Not only do Skinner's arguments not support the form of contextualism he defends, their flaws are actually akin to those he identified in his critique of previous methodological orthodoxies. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner is one of the leading thinkers in the social sciences and humanities today. Since the publication of his first important articles some two decades ago, debate has continued to develop over his distinctive contributions to contemporary political philosophy, the history of political theory, the philosophy of social science, and the discussion of interpretation and hermeneutics across the humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, his most valuable essays and the best critical articles concerning his work have (...) been scattered in various journals and difficult to obtain. Meaning and Context includes five of the most widely discussed articles by Skinner, which present his approach to the study of political thought and the interpretation of texts. Following these are seven articles by his critics, five of these drawn from earlier publications and two, by John Keane and Charles Taylor, written especially for this volume. Finally, there appears a fifty-seven page reply by Skinner--a major new statement in which he defends and reformulates his method and lays out new lines of research. The editorial introduction provides a systematic overview of the evolution of Skinner's work and of the main reactions to it.Besides James Tully, John Keane, and Charles Taylor, the contributors include Joseph V. Femia, Keith Graham, Martin Hollis, Kenneth Minogue, and Nathan Tarcov. (shrink)

This article compares the ways in which Michel Foucault’s and Quentin Skinner’s historical analyses seek to unsettle the limits on present forms of freedom. We do so by comparing their ways of analysing discourse, rationality and agency. The two authors differ significantly in the ways they deal with these three phenomena. The most significant difference lies in their ways of addressing agency and its relationship to power. Notwithstanding these differences, the historical analyses of both authors seek to problematize (...) the ways in which past thoughts and practices limit contemporary forms of freedom. While Foucault seems to go furthest in this endeavour, a comparison may enrich both lines of historical analyses. (shrink)

But while the literature of art is, in publishers' terms, booming, it has in one respect suffered a loss. During the past two hundred years there has usually been some important figure who acted as a censor and an apologist of the contemporary scene, a Diderot, a Baudelaire, a Ruskin or a Roger Frye. Who amongst our living authors plays this important role? What name springs to mind? I would suggest that no name actually springs; the last of our grandly (...) influential critics was Sir Herbert Read and since his death, whatever else modern art may or may not possess, it has no prophet. This is not to say that aesthetic prophets are necessarily desirable nor that there are not some very conscientious and extremely perceptive critics at work today; in view of the fact that I am within a fortnight exhibiting my work in a London dealer's gallery , it would be folly to deny it. But it is I believe true that for better or for worse we have no grand pundit of living art and I believe that this lack may be concerned with what I see as a certain diminution in the role of the art critic, a certain decay in this department of literature. It is a tendency which I regret and the causes of which I want to try to discuss. It arises I believe from a misunderstanding concerning the proper functions of the critic and this confusion of purpose will be my theme. First, however, I think that I should glance at two important circumstances which make the work of an art critic particularly difficult today. Quentin Bell, professor of the history and theory of art at Sussex University, has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists, and, Bloomsbury. His article, "Art and the Elite," appeared in the first issue of Critical Inquiry. "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" was originally delivered as the Leslie Stephen lecture at the University of Cambridge on November 26, 1973. Other contributions are "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

University teachers, as is well known, commit acts of despotism. About three years ago I committed such an act. I told my students that I would not accept papers which included the words protagonist, basic , alienation, total , dichotomy, and a few others including elite and elitist. On consideration I decided to remove the ban on the last two for it seemed to me that there was no other term that could be used to discuss what is, after all, (...) an interesting idea.It is of course true that my students and I use the word incorrectly. An elite must surely be a chosen body. Congress, the police, the final heat of the Miss World contest, and the Bolshevik Party are elites, whereas an aristocracy or a plutocracy—unless one believes the rich and the nobility to be chosen by God—are not. Nevertheless, when we use the word elite in connection with the visual arts it is certainly related to, though not synonymous with, class. An elite is usually a group within a relatively prosperous class. The patrons of the Renaissance were, presumably, at the apex of the social system: on the other hand, the patrons of the Impressionists belonged to a comparatively humble section of the middle classes. But it will be found that an aesthetic elite does always enjoy certain advantages of wealth and leisure and education.Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" , "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

This was to have been a confutation. My intention was to rebut and for the record’s sake to correct certain fashionable errors concerning the life of Virginia Woolf. What could be more proper, and what, it has to be said, more tedious? If the defence of truth had remained my only objet, I should have left these words unwritten, or at least should have addressed them to a very small audience. But the pursuit of truth sent me back to my (...) sources, and there I found a story, in many ways sad, but also funny and certainly instructive. It seemed worth extracting this record of a friendship from the great mass of evidence in which it is embedded. I hope that the reader will agree with me in finding it interesting in itself but, just as Prince’s Hal’s “plain tale” is made livelier by being contrasted with Falstaff’s “eleven buckram men,” so too the simple facts are made more striking by the intentions of Virginia’s recent interpreters. Let me therefore begin with a quotation from one of them.Volume I [of Virginia Woolf’s Letters] has a rarely preserved portrait of a female artist in the making, love and work intensely intertwined in her relations with women who encouraged her to write, read, and think, and gave her the nourishment of womanly love and literary criticism, which she was to seek and find in female friendship all her life. Bloomsbury fades into insignificance as an “influence” next to the radiance of Woolf’s relationships with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, head of the Cooperative Working Women’s Guild, Janet Case, her Greek teacher, violet Dickinson, Madge Vaughan, and her aunt Caroline Stephen, the Quaker whom she called “Nun.”1These words were written by Professor Jane Marcus, a person of great charm and ability, whose opinions are, I understand, accepted by a multitude of admirers. In those articles by her which I have read, she hardly disguises her contempt for me as a biographer. But, painful though it is to have incurred the disdain of so influential a personage, it much be allowed that, if the influence of Virginia Woolf’s husband, her sister, and her closest friends “fades into insignificance” when compared with that of Miss Caroline Stephen and Mrs. W. W. Vaughan, then indeed I have gone sadly astray. Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin, and On Human Finery. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Art and the Elite” and “Bloomsbury and ‘the Vulgar Passions’ ”. (shrink)

It must be admitted that there are some of us who “teach” Virginia Woolf and yet seem unable to learn from her. The secret of Virginia’s eminently readable prose style remains hidden from us. It is for this reason that I find it impossibly hard to read everything that Professor Marcus and some of her colleagues produce in such astounding abundance, and that, she may retort, is why she has found it impossible to read my biography of Virginia Woolf. (...) In a sense, she does not need to; she can imagine it and, thus, credit me with the statement that I considered my aunt “a minor British novelist, ranked somewhere below E. M. Forster as a writer of fiction” . Seeing that I made it clear from the outset of that biography that I would not attempt to assess the work of Virginia Woolf, seeing that I have been blamed for this abstention , and seeing that I have said absolutely nothing at any time that could possibly be construed in this sense, I think that we may well call this a master-stroke of the imagination.Also it is irrelevant. I accuse her of inaccuracy; she “replies” by asserting that I have bad taste. It seems a rather unconvincing form of defence. In fact, in her “reply,” which must be about as long as the article by which it was engendered, Professor Marcus can find so little in the way of evidence or argument with which to support those contentions which I have criticized that the reader must wade through page after page of completely otiose matter before coming to anything which seems to bear on the matter at hand. At last Professor Marcus tells us that she has written “two long essays in which I did at length and in detail exactly what he does here”; here, then, we come to her answer . The reader, who may be somewhat bewildered by so long a preface, may wish to be reminded what there is that needs to be answered. I maintain that Professor Marcus has neglected to notice that Margaret Llewelyn Davis was primarily Leonard Woolf’s friend rather than Virginia’s, that her relationship with Virginia was at times very uneasy, that Virginia was out of sympathy with politically minded women, and that Professor Marcus neglects to notice any of this because she fails to use the evidence of the diaries and the letters. When she does quote from a letter, she completely misunderstands it, just as she fails to understand Virginia’s use of the term “the woman’s republic” . Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Ruskin , Bloomsbury , Virginia Woolf: A Biography , and On Human Finery . His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Art and the Elite” , “Bloomsbury and ‘the Vulgar Passions’” , and “A ‘Radiant’ Friendship”. (shrink)

Part of a collective project for promoting the study of the history of political ideas within the field of the social sciences in French academia, this interview focuses on method, and more specifically on Prof. Quentin Skinner's relationship to the social sciences (from Max Weber to Peter Winch and Pierre Bourdieu). Questions were sent in French, via email, to Quentin Skinner, who answered them in English. The answers were then translated into French and the interview was (...) published in Vers une histoire sociale des idées politiques, ed. Chloé Gaboriaux and Arnault Skornicki (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2017). For editorial reasons, one question and response, regarding method in the Italian tradition of the history of ideas, had to be omitted; it is reintroduced here. The questions have been translated for Theoria by Victor Lu. Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor in the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought (London); Arnault Skornicki is Senior Lecturer at Paris Nanterre University (Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique); and Jérémie Barthas is Researcher at the CNRS (Institut d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine). (shrink)

"An important contribution to contemporary jurisprudential debate and to legal thought more generally, Just Interpretations is far ahead of currently available work."--Peter Goodrich, author of Oedipus Lex "I was struck repeatedly by the clarity of expression throughout the book. Rosenfeld's description and criticism of the recent work of leading thinkers distinguishes his work within the legal theory genre. Furthermore, his own theory is quite original and provocative."--Aviam Soifer, author of Law and the Company We Keep.

[E.H. Gombrich wrote on May 13, 1975:] . . . I recently was invited to talk about "Art" at the Institution for Education of our University. There was a well-intentioned teacher there who put forward the view that we had no right whatever to influence the likes and dislikes of our pupils because every generation had a different outlook and we could not possibly tell what theirs would be. It is the same extreme relativism, which has invaded our art schools (...) and resulted in the doctrine that art could not possibly be taught because only what has been done already can be taught, and since art is creativity it is not possible to teach it. Q.E.D.—I recently asked my history finalists what "Quod erat demonstrandum" means and they did not know. . . . [Quentin Bell responded on May 15, 1975:] . . . Your teacher at the Institute, is he really a relativist? Isn't he a kind of religious zealot? I used to teach school children. With me there was a much better teacher . One day she came into the room where I had been teaching and found a series of the most surprising and beautiful water colours. "What are these?" said she. I explained that they were copies of Raphael made by eleven and twelve year old children. I would have gone on to explain how interested I was by their resemblance, not to Raphael but rather to Simone Martini, for they had all the shapes beautifully right but none of the internal drawing or the sentiment, but I was checked by her look of horror. "You've made them copy from Raphael?" she said. Her expression was exactly that of someone who had been casually informed that that I had committed a series of indecent assaults upon the brats. And in fact in subsequent conversation it appeared that this was very nearly what she did feel. For her, what she called "self expression" was as precious as virginity. E.H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His books include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic Images, The Heritage of Apelles, and In Search of Cultural History. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Notes and Exchanges" ,"Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" , and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" . Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" , "Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

Disturbed by these acrimonious arguments, the authors - former colleagues and university-press board members - embarked on an ambitious project to reexamine a number of major literary and philosophical works dealing with the liberal arts and education. With their discussions ranging from Plato to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer offer not a history of education philosophy but an examination of the present.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and JudgmentJames Arnt AuneSaving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. Bryan Garsten. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 276. $45.00, hardcover.Something of what rhetoricians perennially run up against in modern political philosophy is illustrated by a recent article by Jürgen Habermas in Communication Theory. In a searing indictment of contemporary democracy and the mass media, Habermas writes, "Issues (...) of political discourse become assimilated into and absorbed by the modes and contents of entertainment. Besides personalization, the dramatization of events, the simplification of complex matters, and the vivid polarization of conflicts promote civic privatism and a mood of antipolitics" (2006, 422). Any historian of political communication in the Western democracies since the early nineteenth century is bound to be puzzled by this observation, for the emergence of mass democracy in the United States and England, at least, was characterized by intense popular participation in politics, precisely because political campaigns were heavily personalized, dramatized, simplified, and polarized. At the beginning of the article, Habermas praises Aristotle's Politics for its union of normative theorizing and empirical research, forgetting apparently that Aristotle also wrote a normative and empirical Rhetoric.That Habermas distrusts persuasion is obvious, but what is less clear is how the rhetoriphobia he shares with virtually every modern and contemporary philosopher came about. Bryan Garsten's book—the most important work on rhetoric and political philosophy since Ronald Beiner's Political Judgment—makes the startlingly original argument that the anti-rhetorical stance not only is grounded in a suspicion of private judgment, but that it can be traced back to Hobbes's, Rousseau's, and Kant's fear of the persuasive power of post-Reformation religious enthusiasm. Garsten not only provides provocative rereadings of these three fathers of modern liberalism but also extends our understanding of rhetorical and political judgment in Aristotle and Cicero. His analysis of the problems of persuasion and democracy in the twentieth century, while somewhat less satisfying, includes cogent criticisms of Rawls, Habermas, and theorists of deliberative democracy from what might be called a Ciceronian-Madisonian republican stance. [End Page 94]Saving Persuasion began as a doctoral dissertation in Government at Harvard, under the direction of Harvey Mansfield—after Allan Bloom, perhaps the most influential and controversial of the disciples of Leo Strauss. Although Garsten's book displays both the virtues and vices of Straussianism, it would be unfair to dismiss it as a neoconservative manifesto for rhetoric. (An enthusiastic review of the book appeared in the neoconservative Weekly Standard in February 2007, illustrating the curious fact that the Right "gets" rhetoric in ways that liberals and leftists do not (Deneen 2007).) Currently an assistant professor of political science at Yale, Garsten also received an MA from Cambridge in political theory and intellectual history. His book reveals the influence of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School of political theory, whose insistence on reading political philosophy in its historical context is the antithesis of the Straussian rejection of historicism. Garsten thus combines the Straussian emphasis on close reading with the contextual-rhetorical perspective of Skinner; this unique synthesis enables Garsten to solve some ongoing problems in textual interpretation (especially the relationship between Academic skepticism and Stoic natural law theory in Cicero) while developing interesting causal arguments about the rise of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, the decline of interest in rhetoric by liberal political theorists, and the pathologies of contemporary democratic politics.The book is divided into two main parts, following an introduction in which Garsten lays out his central thesis: "[A] politics of persuasion—in which people try to change one another's minds by appealing not only to reason but also to passions and sometimes even prejudices—is a mode of politics worth defending. Persuasion is worthwhile because it requires us to pay attention to our fellow citizens and to display a certain respect for their points of view and their judgments" (3). Persuasion rightly understood cannot be reduced either to manipulation or pandering. Rather, persuasion is inextricably linked to judgment, a human faculty threatened by modernity. Judgment is "the mental activity of responding to particular situations" by... (shrink)

Although the literature on the logic of historical enquiry is already vast and still growing, it continues to polarise overwhelmingly around a single disputed point—whether historical explanations have their own logic, or whether every successful explanation must conform to the same deductive model. Recent discussion, moreover, has shown an increasing element of agreement—there has been a marked trend away from accepting any strictly positivist view of the matter. It will be argued here that both the traditional polarity and the recent (...) trend in this debate have tended to be misleading. The positiviste have been damagingly criticised. But their opponents have produced no satisfying alternative. They have tended instead to accept as proper historical explanations whatever has been offered by the historians themselves in the course of trying to explain the past. But a further type of analysis must be required if some account is to be given of the status, and not merely the function, of the language in which these explanations are offered. Such an analysis, moreover has implications of some importance in considering the appropriate strategy for historical enquiries. (shrink)

This lecture presents the text of the speech about the genealogy of the modern state delivered by the author at the 2008 British Academy Lecture. It explains that to investigate the genealogy of the state is to discover that there has never been any agreed concept to which the word state has answered. The lecture suggests that any moral or political term that has become so deeply enmeshed in so many ideological disputes over such a long period of time is (...) bound to resist any efforts at definition. (shrink)

Emphasis on autonomy of texts presupposes that there are perennial concepts. But researchers' expectations may turn history into mythology of ideas; researchers forget that an agent cannot be described as doing something he could not understand as a description, and that thinking may be inconsistent. They will never uncover voluntary oblique strategies and by treating ideas as units will confuse sentences with statements. On the other hand, a contextual approach to the meaning of texts dismisses ideas as unimportant effects. Neither (...) method shows how what was said was meant is crucial for understanding. There are no perennial problems; philosophers of different times do not speak directly to us. But history of ideas helps us recognize the contingency of many of our beliefs. (shrink)

Foucault and Skinner have each offered influential accounts of the emergence of the state as a defining element of modern political thought. Yet the two accounts have never been brought into dialogue; this non-encounter is made more interesting by the fact that Foucault's and Skinner's accounts are at odds with one another. There is therefore much to be gained by examining this divergence. In this article I attempt this task by first setting out the two accounts of the (...) state, and then some of the methodological strictures each thinker has suggested. I argue that the divergence between Foucault's and Skinner's accounts of the state is indeed driven by differences in method, as we might expect; but I also argue that these differences in method can themselves be well explained by the differing political motivations each thinker has at times articulated. Thus it is possible to make politics, and not method, the privileged point of this reconciliation. (shrink)

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Niccolò Machiavelli taught that political leaders must be prepared to do evil deeds in order to ensure the general good of the state, and ever since his name has signified duplicity and immorality. But is his sinister reputation deserved? To answer this question, Quentin Skinner focuses on three of Machiavelli’s major works- The Prince , Discourses , and The History of Florence . His analyses and distillation of these texts provide an introduction of exemplary clarity to Machiavelli’s doctrines.

Quentin Skinner focuses on three major works, The Prince, the Discourses, and The History of Florence, and distils from them an introduction to Machiavelli's doctrines of exemplary clarity.

The political make-up of the contemporary world changes with such rapidity that few attempts have been made to consider with adequate care, the nature and value of the concept of sovereignty. What exactly is meant when one speaks about the acquisition, preservation, infringement or loss of sovereignty? This book revisits the assumptions underlying the applications of this fundamental category, as well as studying the political discourses in which it has been embedded. Bringing together historians, constitutional lawyers, political philosophers and experts (...) in international relations, Sovereignty in Fragments seeks to dispel the illusion that there is a unitary concept of sovereignty of which one could offer a clear definition. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of international relations, international law and the history of political thought. (shrink)