Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner's Foundations

Written by K. R. Minogue, “Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner’s Foundations” was originally published in the journal Philosophy (Volume 56, Issue 218) in October 1981. The article reflects on Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought and examines the philosophical assumptions behind Skinner’s approach to interpreting historical texts, political ideas, and authorial intention.

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Quentin Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought¹ is primarily of interest to philosophers not for its excellent account of European thought about the state but for the self-conscious philosophy which has gone into it. It is a rare historian who pauses to get his philosophy in order before he embarks on a major enterprise, though such a policy is possibly less unusual in intellectual history than in other fields. In Skinner's case, however, this order of doing things has been pushed so far that he counts as a philosopher in his own right, rather than as merely someone who is unusually careful to think about what he is doing. The publication of this major work thus provides a convenient opportunity to make a few remarks about the relation between historical theory and practice.

I

Professor Skinner's fundamental belief is that the development of intellectual history depends upon an appropriate philosophical understanding. We learn from the preface that the Foundations exemplifies 'a particular way of approaching the study and interpretation of historical texts', and he goes on to link the virtues of the method with the virtues of the book. In more recent contributions to the philosophical field, subsequent to the publication of the Foundations, he has pleaded for further work on method since otherwise the disciplines of the human sciences 'will continue to suffer from their present conceptual disarray'. At its most extreme, this position seems to amount to saying that no hitherto written intellectual history is satisfactory, since he tells us that if the approach he champions were practised with success, 'it might begin to give us a history of political thought with a genuinely historical character' (my italics). There is no doubt that Skinner is prepared to press hard on the view that the correct method is a necessary condition of good practice.

He also recognizes two implications of this view, and we may begin to explore the position by considering them. The first is that whatever virtues an intellectual history has will be attributable to good method, and this appears in the preface to the Foundations where Skinner asks if any new discoveries have come out of the new method. He cites two. Earlier intellectual historians had not adequately realized how much the political thought of the Renaissance had been influenced by the Stoics. And another discovery: 'it has not I think been sufficiently recognized that the theories they (sc. Calvinist revolutionaries) developed were almost entirely couched in the legal and moral language of their Catholic adversaries'." These are historically interesting contentions, but it will immediately be apparent that there is nothing in them which necessarily results from the use of the philosophy of speech acts or an immersion in hermeneutic theory. The examples given do not even provide inductive support for the principle asserted.

The second implication is that bad intellectual history results from bad or intellectually incoherent method. The central target of Skinner's criticism has been something called 'the textualist approach' which was described and anatomized in his first important contribution to the methodology of intellectual history: 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas', Most of the critical elements of his theory are here laid out in the form of a syllabus of errors resulting from a belief in timeless answers to perennial questions; in implausible coherences to be detected in a writer's thought, in seeing a thinker as 'anticipating' ideas which were not formulated till later, and much else. Critics of Skinner have often seen this controversy in terms of a conflict between political theorists, who tend to immerse themselves in the great texts of political thought, and historians whose tendency is to dissolve writings in the wider context of events to which they belong. All the political theorists wanted was to be left alone with their books (thus John Plamenatz: 'Is there to be no division of labour?"), grateful if

historians should correct their odd historically implausible misreading of their texts. But the Skinnerian programme seemed at times to be a war à outrance in which only one of these academic activities could survive the great debate. One must emphasize 'seems' here, partly because the issues were never entirely clear, and partly because Skinner's position was often modified towards a common sense accommodation in the course of its development. Sometimes, indeed, modified too far. Thus, in a flank-guarding exercise towards the end of 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas' he tells us that his position 'is not even a denial of the possibility that there may be apparently perennial questions, if these are sufficiently abstractly framed it will be found that what counts as an answer will usually look, in a different culture or period, so different in itself that it can hardly be in the least useful even to go on thinking of the relevant question as being "the same" in the required sense after all. More crudely: we must learn to do our thinking for ourselves. ' Now one might, perhaps, deny that there is any such thing as a perennial question, but if one admits such a thing (or even 'apparently' perennial questions!) then there must also be perennial answers, since the cultural specificity of the answers must unavoidably affect the questions as well. And it is, of course, the youthful incaution of that 'we must do our thinking for ourselves' which dismayed the political theorists. For when, say, social psychologists take off from Machiavelli in setting up a typology of high machs and middle machs or when, for example, Miss Anscombe sets off in a discussion of future events from Aristotle's discussion of the sea-battle they are certainly not abdicating their thought to Machiavelli or Aristotle. They are merely using materials which, although from one point of view they may be historical records, can also be used in a non-historical way. Just as one finds aesthetic value in the Parthenon, the Sistine Chapel, and The Magic Flute (though these are also historical survivals which can tell us something of the period) so one may also find philosophical value in works of earlier writers.

It is certainly true that historians will find some very strange things said in political studies whenever historical personages are referred to. But, as Skinner would no doubt agree, in reading another writer one must be sensitive to his intention in saying what he does, and this salutary rule is often ignored in the course of the enthusiastic trawl of errors which constitutes the first part of 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas'. To take a couple of examples: Robert A. Dahl earns his place as believing in a universal human nature on the basis of a couple of casual sentences appended in a bibliographical note to a chapter of his Modern Political Analysis. Again, Robert Armstrong falls under anathema for using the unhistorical idea of 'anticipation' in connecting Locke with Berkeley. All he is actually doing is, at the end of an article, pointing to an abstract affinity between the two writers: 'Berkeley's metaphysics, then, may be regarded as a development of an idea suggested by Locke. Or we may regard Locke's theory as an anticipation of Berkeley's metaphysics.' To indict a man's historical credentials on the basis of the odd throwaway line is, I think, pretty clearly to ignore the intention of the writer; and if one were to take this practice seriously, one would have to infer that Skinner is affirming some such unlikely doctrine as: 'All past objects must be under-stood as evidence for historical understanding, and they must be under-stood in no other way whatever'. One has merely to state this view in its extreme form to recognize that it could not possibly be held; and indeed, if ever held, it was smartly abandoned.

It should now be clear that an important clarification is needed before one could even begin to decide the question of whether bad intellectual history results from bad method. In his long critical essay, Skinner lights upon many instances of remarks which must indeed be recognized as bad history; and he attributes them to false methodological assumptions about coherence, perenniality and the rest. This argument is totally invalid unless these writers are asking historical questions. Skinner does, on occasion, recognize that philosophers may have found in timeless abstraction an exemption from his historical strictures; but this is not enough. Telling stories is an important part of the explanatory practices of all societies and in many activities; in some domains, there are no other forms of explanation. A great deal of political argument takes place in terms of 'historical' analogies, and the word 'historical' here has to be protected by quotation marks because the references in this type of argument are historical in the popular sense of referring to the past, but not historical in the sense of being contributions to the academic problem of attempting to understand some passage of events in a properly historical manner. Again, in a world of incessant controversy, our understanding of 'the classic texts' is a valuable resource for naming and signposting ideas. This is part, though only a part, of the form of literature named (and perhaps misnamed) the 'history' of political ideas. It is easy to demonstrate that the whole thing is historically an absurdity. But, clearly, important and interesting arguments have been advanced within this curious genre by people like Wolin, Strauss and Arendt. Most of the criticism of Skinner by political theorists consists essentially in howls of anguish that this lovable old absurdity should be so shoddily treated.

One might, indeed, take this argument one step further. There are evidently two ways of interpreting a work like Hobbes's Leviathan. One is to put it in a context of Hobbes's other writings and see it as a work of philosophy; another way (which is licensed by some of Hobbes's remarks) is to see it within a context of the events of the time. In understanding Hobbes, we are not bound to employ either way exclusively, and each may be sensible according to the questions that concern us. Each way has its dangers. There is evidently a danger that in understanding a work as a response to a context, for example, we may underestimate that less evident concern which philosophers and other serious writers have to maintain the consistency of their thought. And it is possible that a history of political ideas written in this latter manner will allow the context systematically to cannibalize each writer, who will be represented only by those bits of his thought which appear to be relevant according to our conjecture, and it can hardly be more of the practical problem he was responding to. As a tendency to distort a writer's coherence arising from too gross a concern with context, we might, after Skinner, call this the mythology of fragmentation, and some critics have seen this as characteristic of the Foundations.16 This fallacy may be seen in Skinner's treatment of Hobbes, whom he attempts to assimilate to the de facto theorists of the Engagement Controversy. 'It is clear... that there is nothing unusual or even particularly original about Hobbes's most characteristic political beliefs' is a remark that assurnes that a 'belief' is merely the practical conclusion arrived at; whereas we might suggest that the real belief is in part constituted by the reasons for it, which were certainly highly original. Understood whole, Hobbes cannot be thus so easily assimilated to the polemicists of his day. Hobbes did, we are told, make 'it quite clear that he both saw and intended his great work precisely as a contribution to the existing debate about the rights of de facto power. It goes without saying that Leviathan is much else besides. ' Well, it doesn't have to go without much saying because Hobbes said it himself, and pretty decisively. He said that he was the founder of civil science. And while it picks up some stray remarks Hobbes made, to say that Hobbes was 'contributing to the debate' is quite to miss the tone of Hobbes's thought. He was bent on ending the debate, not contributing to it. To go further along this path would be a diversion; but the conclusion I draw is that the claim that historians can correct what political theorists say about the great thinkers of the past is, while far from being absurd, much less evidently illuminating than Skinner habitually claims.

II

Still, to suggest that Skinner is an exponent of historical fundamentalism is unjust to him because he is really a philosophical imperialist in historical disguise. It is a transforming method which lies at the heart of his concerns. We thus seem to have a chain of influence by which the philosopher develops the concepts by which we understand human action, to the benefit of the historian, whose results can in turn rule out of court the errors resulting from the textualist approach of the political theorist. Further, history studied in this way reveals how little understanding can come from the abstractions by which we ordinarily try to leap across cultural and temporal boundaries. Humility on this point is one of the promised fruits of the method, with just possibly the hope that the new method will broaden our imaginative horizons.

Thus we find ourselves confronted with the project of putting intellectual history on solid philosophical foundations. Such a project runs into immediate difficulties, because it transfers all discussion of general ideas in history to a more abstract methodological level. The focused talk of practitioners, usually found in obiter dicta scattered through their histories, is judged, and often misjudged, as the advancing of methodological propositions. Confusion occurs here even at the philosophical level. Thus Herbert Butterfield remarks that in interpreting, for example, the sixteenth century, we ought not to see it in anachronistic terms such as 'progressive' against 'reactionary' but ought rather to 'adopt the outlook' of the sixteenth century upon itself. Skinner takes these sensible words as being one possible solution to a question that Skinner himself is posing, and proceeds to pepper the remark with pleasantries about its entailing a seventeenth-century history of ethics without Spinoza, and a nineteenth-century history of logic without Frege. But Butterfield, writing in a less desperately methodological idiom, meant nothing remotely like this: and indeed, what he did mean is endorsed by Skinner only two pages further on. A related danger of confusion arises when historical method is imposed on those who have other interests. Thus the unfortunate John Plamenatz, into whose protesting hands a banner marked 'the textualist approach to intellectual history' is regularly thrust immediately prior to condign punishment being meted out, is simply not concerned with Skinner's questions. Thus Skinner is very much interested in whether or not Locke, by ignoring prescription and historical argument in the Second Treatise, 'had the intention to shift the discussion of political obligation on to a more abstract level'. This is an interesting question, though it does not follow, as Skinner goes on to claim, that 'We can scarcely be said to have understood Locke's text until we have considered what he was doing at this crucial stage in his argument'. This is a little odd even in terms of the Skinnerian argument, since he has already put to rest our suspicions that his work is haunted by some notional goal of a complete or full understanding of a text. Hence, there are many things to understand about Locke's text, and one of them is the cogency of the abstract arguments he did present, leaving aside the question of whether he was also intending to produce a kind of paradigm shift in the terms of English political argument. What Plamenatz does is to remark, rather mildly, that there are some writers of whom it can be said that 'we learn more about their arguments by weighing them over and over again than by extending our knowledge of the circumstances in which they wrote'. Skinner assimilates Plamenatz to Skinner's own question, remarking that 'we can never hope to attain such an understanding simply by reading the text 'over and over again' in the way that some commentators have urged'. Plamenatz, of course, never said you could. Altogether, there is a lot of loose talk about approaches, and not enough concern with what it is that is being approached. It is thus one disadvantage of transposing all talk about intellectual history into the project of a search for the one correct method that a great deal of contingent misunderstanding is likely to take place. But leaving these difficulties behind, let us consider what an appropriate methodology of intellectual history would look like. I take it that intellectual history is a circumstantial explanation of the ideas of earlier times. We ask about Luther's ideas, and understand them by relating them to his theological preoccupations and the political tensions of his time, so that what he did and thought becomes an intelligible outcome of a human situation. Now a methodology of intellectual history must be an abstract set of ideas in terms of which one is guided to asking all of the questions necessary to eliciting such an explanation. There must be a one to one relationship between the questions that must be asked of a passage of intellectual history, on the one hand, and the distinctions and concepts of the methodology on the other. A fully satisfactory methodology would guide the historian in every question he asks, and its justification lies in the suggestion that the unguided historian is in fact already guided, but only in a confused and irregular way, by a jumble of approaches which leave many of the subtleties of human action unobserved. The beginning of intellectual history lies in asking: What did X mean? What was the point of his act or utterance? Now early on in his quest for a method, Skinner came upon the Austinian theory of specch acts, which allowed him to transpose these questions into the philosophical language of locutionary and illocutionary acts. To understand Luther, for example, we must look for the illocutionary force of his utterance. And the reason that this transposition constitutes an advance is, presumably, because, while there is little general elaboration that can be done with the idea of the 'point' of an action or utterance, there is a great deal of conceptual elaboration actually going on to render the speech act theory a subtle and coherent theory of great range and application.

So far so good, at least in the sense that what the skilled historian will instinctively do can at least be redescribed in the language of the speech act. And no doubt this might well be valuable in stimulating the imagination and awareness of the historian. But, as Skinner is perfectly aware, the advice: Look for the illocutionary acts being performed by the personages of history, is radically incomplete. We have already noted that he is impressed by the fact that one of the most important features of Locke's Second Treatise may consist in what he did not say. What, then, is the illocutionary force of a silence? Indeed, how does one even detect a silence, since all of us are silent about an infinite number of things? It is clear that this is a point where the methodology won't help, for even if we try the obvious ploy of generalizing about all other writers of a period, and seeing which of the generalizations are not true of X, we shall still be dependent upon instinct to guide us in finding that silence which might deserve our attention. Again, it is an important part of an illocutionary act that it depends upon the prevailing conventions by which such an act may be performed. But then, as Peter Strawson has pointed out, some illocutionary acts involve social conventions in a way that others do not. Skinner is well aware that the theory of speech acts goes on ramifying according to the theoretical interests of philosophers, and it is far from clear which of these branches, if any, will be any use to historians. We need not doubt that the philosophy of speech acts, like hermeneutics, belongs to the wider cultural field of which intellectual history is a part; and that the latter will benefit from contact with the former. But so too will it benefit, on occasion, from contact with psychology, or anthropology, and much else. It all depends on the contingent matter of putting acute and penetrating questions into the heads of intellectual historians. Hence there is room to doubt whether they ought to sympathize with Skinner in feeling 'an increasing need to look for renewed philosophical help'.

The test of the general contention would be to produce specific problems in intellectual history where a block to the understanding had been removed, and also could only have been removed, by the application of a philosophical doctrine. It is one of the virtues of Skinner's work that he is constantly aware of this test, but it cannot be said to have produced any notable successes. Thus he observes that there are some questions to be asked about Machiavelli's remark that 'a prince must learn how not to be virtuous' which cannot be answered by the closest of textual attention. Nor, he adds, will fishing in the social context help much. And, formulating the issue in the simple terms of whether Machiavelli was merely repeating a commonplace piece of cynicism, or trying to subvert an established moral truth, between which we must come down on one side or the other, he gets us to a formal statement of what he thinks the nature of the problem is: "The further point which must still be grasped for any given statement is how what was said was meant, and thus what relations there may have been between various different statements even within the same general con-text'.30 And there we are left, rather high and dry, without any idea of quite how this puts us ahead of an intelligent student of Machiavelli pondering the question in his own way. And how would such an innocent think about the problems of intellectual history? Well, we can bring philosophy here to something of a test by considering how J. W. Allen, writing back in the pre-methodological days of the 1920s, deals with what Skinner calls 'the mythology of coherence which occurs when historians succumb to the temptation to 'find in each of [the] texts the coherence which they may appear to lack'. Allen, as it happens, wrote a history of political ideas in the sixteenth century31 on a similar scale and covering some of the ground of the Foundations. Dealing with the problem of understanding Machiavelli, he writes:

In reading Machiavelli with intent to grasp his thought as a whole, we have constantly to make correlations that he did not distinctly make, to take note of implications about which he is silent and to give some degree of definition to what he has left indefinite. The result must, to some extent at least, be to give his thought a fullness and coherency which his writings afford no solid ground for supposing that it possessed. The whole process is fallacious and, if we adopt it, it is only by the greatest care that we can hope to avoid gross misrepresentation... We are bound to look for a unity which, however loosely articulated, must have been there. We cannot know for certain how much of what he left unexpressed was actually in his mind, but it is certain that he left much unexpressed.

Someone who writes like this would no doubt approve of what Skinner has to say, but there doesn't seem much to teach him. And it is here, in the talk of practitioners as they reflect on the problems raised by their specific questions (rather than one set of questions thought universally relevant to all intellectual historians) that we find a different kind of methodology. To improve on this is a bit like trying to make Groucho Marx a better comic by drilling him in Freud on wit and Bergson on laughter.

For the point about intellectual history is that it is, of almost all academic activities, one of the most resistant to reduction to form. With a sonnet, or a scientific hypothesis, there is a clear sense of form and thread of relevance, and hence there may (or may not) be lots of work for various general methods to do. In intellectual history, by contrast, the nexus of problems and solutions is extraordinarily diffuse, and the historian is to be found giving us information, supplying background, pointing out analogies, and in general providing us with (in Skinner's terms) an 'outline account' of much that was written and done. Hence the rhetoric is extraordinarily vulnerable at every point. Thus in the Foundations (and why, one may wonder, are they plural?) Skinner takes us through the acts and responses of Europeans over several centuries, only to arrive at a point outside of history when we have acquired an unhistorical something called 'the modern concept of the state'. Suddenly at this point, we move into analysis and schema, and Skinner has abandoned history. Again, history unfolds continuously, but one of the attractive features of Skinnerian exposition is the deft use he makes of literary devices like the flashback. The very title of the work containing, as it does, the metaphor of foundations—might pedantically be indicted in terms of an error which Skinner calls the 'mythology of prolepsis', since it implicitly understands its personages as contributing (another dangerous word) to a building which was no part of their experience or their intentions.

Consider, further, the difficulty of avoiding anachronistic terminology which will distort the intention of the people being studied. We have noted that Herbert Butterfield thought that 'progressive' and 'reactionary' were distorting words to use, and it is evident that Skinner avoids modern political words. But he still feels the need to make some sort of judgment of the same kind, and hence he is much addicted to words like 'conservative', 'radical' and even 'subversive'. Those Lutheran and Catholic writers who advocate passive obedience to the rulers are 'conservative' while constitutionalists and those who find reasons for resistance to rulers are 'radical'. This makes perfectly good sense if one assumes a long-term historical drift towards democracy, in which case radical is anything that co-operates with this drift and conservative that which opposes it. But in the England of 1535, for example, it was King Henry VIII who was being radical-he was, after all, tearing up the religious establishment by the roots-while 'the king's good servant, but God's first' Sir Thomas More was, in his resistance, being profoundly conservative, Skinner seems to think that advising the people not to resist the edicts of their rulers was equivalent to advising them to sit around passively munching their feed like sheep, which is a typically modern prejudice. Since this was a population which nearly tore Europe apart with its violent addiction to its own prejudices and its limitless lust for innovation, one can only wonder what they would have got up to if their preachers had not ceaselessly fixed their minds upon the contents of the Epistle to the Romans, 13. One wonders this rather in the spirit of Lenin pondering what the vegetarian George Bernard Shaw might not have achieved had he eaten a beefsteak.

I conclude that the search for the one correct methodology is often unilluminating because it imports a good deal of confusion into the discussion of how to do history. What it generates will necessarily be incomplete, partly because even an endless elaboration of distinctions will never properly replicate the subtle responses of the historian to his material; and also for the familiar reason that no method can prescribe the terms of its own application. It is unnecessary because intellectual historiam (especially when they are not lumped in with political theorists and other related species) have long shown themselves to be aware of most of what has so far emerged from the methodological discussion: on this point, we ought no doubt to wait in patience for the possibilities of future breakthroughs, but there is room for a little preliminary scepticism. And one may perhaps add that a great deal of the philosophy of speech acts is irrelevant, since even were philosophers definitively to settle such questions as whether reasons can be reduced to causes—a supposition of stunning improbability—it will have no effect whatever upon the procedures of the intellectual historian, who will still be searching out reasons anyway.

This is perhaps enough. But I think we can go further, and suggest that the project is, additionally, pernicious.

III

The problem at the heart of intellectual history arises from the fact that ideas have two aspects. They are abstract and universal, and it is in virtue of this character that they allow communication to bridge such gulfs as person to person, epoch to epoch and culture to culture. But the thinking of any idea is also a specific occurrence which has a spatio-temporal location and a social context. Philosophers are interested in the abstract ideas, historians in the individuality of the utterance, and the problem of the intellectual historian is how to negotiate this extremely interesting and poorly demarcated frontier.

One solution to this problem, valuable for its single-minded clarity, was A. O. Lovejoy's theory that the intellectual historian follows the adventures of unit-ideas which underlie the thought and writing of each epoch, ideas which pass from time to time and genre to genre, recombining as they go, rather like randy chemical elements in an unstable soup. This must, I suppose, be the most unhistorical account it is possible to give of the basis of a history of ideas, since the only historical work that seems to be left reduces to identifying the unit-ideas underneath the circumstantial variation, and the chronological matter of who said what to whom, when and where; yet it did not prevent Lovejoy and many of those he influenced from producing some excellent history.

The intellectual historian's practical problem is: where should he find his thread of relevance? Lovejoy had based his theory on the universal element of the idea. The great chain of being, for example, appears in Plato and goes through many transformations to resurface in Pope's Essay on Man where it is ready to pass on to further impersonations. The actual context of such ideas was, for Lovejoy, a tiny hook suitable for chronological docketing and identification. Since that time, theory (though not invariably practice) has gone entirely in the other direction. An idea is how it functions in its context; and what was a tiny hook in Lovejoy becomes the essence of the idea for later writers, leaving the universal element shrunk very close to vanishing point. Such is the process which underlies Skinner's equivocal remarks on perenniality. Ideas must become, as it were, historio-degrad-able: dissolvable into circumstance. The practical consequence of this reversal has at times been that historians of ideas have avoided philosophical writers, who don't easily dissolve in history, and sought for their material among publicists and pamphleteers. Skinner's earliest forays reveal this bias of attention very clearly, for 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas' began its life as a scintillating conference paper called "The Unimportance of the Great Texts in the History of Political Thought'.

Now whether to look to the text or the context is not a very serious question for an intellectual historian: he will answer it according to the question he is asking, and methodological prescriptions which try to give a general answer are so much waste of time. As so often happens in this field, there is remarkably little that can profitably be said in general. But the intellectual historian who accepts the project of getting help in his (usually non-existent) perplexities from philosophers will soon find himself pretty confused. Lovejoy seems to be encouraging him to go around pulling off the false noses and assumed wigs by which time and circumstance disguise the fundamental unit-ideas that underlie thought. John Pocock thinks he ought to take off from languages and some political equivalent of the Kuhnian paradigm. Sir Karl Popper is eager to rescue him from some rather unlikely misunderstandings by invoking his ontological theory of World 3, in which 'psychological relations' are replaced by 'the analysis of third-world relations'. And meanwhile, Skinner is dazzling him with excursions into speech acts and hermeneutics. Even if he merely flips a coin in order to choose between these and other forms of methodological salvation being marketed, the historian will find that he has taken on board a cargo of philosophical theory on whose validity—not easily testable—his work as a historian will be dangerously dependent.

Indeed, he will be lucky if it is only a philosophical theory he is lumbered with, for philosophy's attempt to rescue the historian from excess abstraction can often be stopped half way, and as a result lumber him with, additionally, a sociological theory. At its crudest, the insistence that writers don't write in a vacuum and that every thinker is the product of the society he lives in leads directly on to the idea that the writer is merely the epiphenomenon of deeper tensions or transitions in the society. Thus Plato turns into an apologist for the aristocracy, Hobbes a sensitive reed vibrating to the perception that the society around him is turning into capitalism. There is obviously enough theory here to sink a historian, whose primary task is to regain a pre-theoretical innocence about general trends so that he can respond to the actual evidence before him. Skinner is in general a stern critic of these excesses in all their forms. The general thrust of his methodological interests has been to appropriate for history those intellectual objects which were being converted into somewhat pointless philosophical currency, and in this objective he represents a salutary development of ideas about intellectual history following Love-joy's work. His awareness of the problem can be seen in such remarks as his insistence that we must beware of the 'over-enthusiastic adoption of a completely sociological approach, through which the object of analysis becomes nothing less than the whole gamut of "languages" in which a nation articulates its political experience over time... ' Here the target of criticism is John Pocock, but much more vulnerable objects can easily be thought of. The problem is that the methodologist who may perhaps save us from timeless essences may, if he is not careful, involve us with no less disastrous postulates about a changeless society. It is not, of course, that anyone thinks that societies don't change; rather, that the idea of social change is often essentially unhistorical. It is a matter of systems, stages of evolution, process, transition and similar abstract ideas. Now an insistence on 'the social' is part of the way Skinner has moved from texts to contexts, however subtle he has been in construing this relationship. The illocutionary act depends upon the conventions by which communication takes place. Focus on the prevailing conventions, is the advice he gives, since 'to understand what any given writer may have been doing in using some particular concept or argument, we need first of all to grasp the nature and range of things that could recognizably have been done by using that particular concept, in the treatment of that particular theme, at that particular time'. Now what the historian wants to know is what the man was actually doing in using the particular concept. He may or may not hit upon the answer. But the advice that he should go off on a detour of setting up 'the nature and range of things that could recognizably have been done by using that particular concept' is not only to involve him in an impossible task, but also one that requires endless theorizing. More generally, we may say that the whole idea of 'the prevailing conventions' will tend to import a static fixity into the work of the historian which can only tempt him into sociological shortcuts. Modern philosophy is rightly sceptical of the view that science is an expanding body of proven fact and theory; and philosophy itself is all the more subject to continuing change and revision. It would seem, then, that the more the historian lives—self-critically—within his own resources of evidence, the better.

A further aspect of the danger may be illustrated by some of the curious notions that currently infest this literature. Students of hermeneutics sometimes write of 'textual strategies' as if the text were a hostile animal to be trapped and disarmed; and it is remarkably common in this field for philosophers to talk about 'decoding' the social meaning of a speech act, as if communication involved a special form of scrambling to prevent its meaning being known to outsiders. Skinner himself has picked up this strange way of speaking, and imports it into Strawson's standard example of the skater to whom the policeman remarks that the ice over there is very thin, an utterance which Skinner thinks has to be decoded by the skater in order to discover its meaning. And here, by contrast with the more selective theory advanced by Leo Strauss to the effect that political philosophers sometimes conceal from outsiders the real kernel of their doctrine, everything is taken to be a matter of decoding. As well as the risk of error, then, there is the risk of picking up the modish distortions common in most fields of theorizing, and this is an additional hazard.

The standard objection to my line of criticism takes the form of pointing out that the historian necessarily takes a lot for granted, and the more self-conscious he is about this, the better. No doubt he does, though we shall see in section IV that there is often less to this than meets the eye. But what is useful to the historian is to realize what he is actually taking for granted in some specific bit of thinking about past argument, and remarkably little can be contributed here by general theories about conventions, society, classes and the rest.

Fundamentally, then, an intellectual historian ought to be an epistemological naif, and the less he thinks he knows in advance, the better. Now it is one of the things that Skinner knows that the history of political thought must be written as a history of ideologies. Indeed, only such a history appears to be recognizable as 'real history', presumably because the word 'ideology' has been taken to mean thought in response to a situation, by contrast with thinking about timeless essences. Being a sophisticated exponent of this view, Skinner does at times contrast the 'theoretical' and the 'ideological' significance of thought; among his more valuable contributions to the philosophy of intellectual history has been to find convincing ways of explaining why political doctrines are not mere instruments of justification. And in the Foundations he is dealing with a time when philosophical achievement was not great and when most political theory can be seen as having a pretty clear practical purpose. Yet it remains possible to wonder whether the idea does not at points clog his understanding.

Our doubts may initially focus upon the dominant metaphor of 'a large

arsenal of ideological weapons available to be exploited by the revolutionaries of late sixteenth-century Europe'. This is a typical and recurring phrase. But the metaphor is curiously inappropriate, since an ideological weapon cannot destroy an enemy position by bombardment from the outside, as it were, but can only act as a kind of fifth column by cooperating with the enemy's genuine convictions in destroying his position. It is in virtue of what sixteenth-century men shared-reverence for authority, Christianity, etc. rather than of what divided them, that the political doctrines of the period were effective in persuasion. In terms of argument, it is the shared rather than the contested which is always fundamental, and in seeing merely an exchange of weapons, Skinner seems to me to be taking over one of the dominant features of the political realism of our age:the assumption that conflict is more fundamental than co-operation in human life. The effect of this assumption is to create a gap in his history. We learn in the Foundations much about arguments advanced by this writer or that, but hardly anything about the audience. People, however, do not as a rule rush forward to be devastated by weapons: they rush forward to engage with them because these arguments, far from being merely weapons to destroy conviction, also answer questions which the readers must have found puzzling or worrying. The audience is the great missing character of the Foundations, especially in Volume II. It does make occasional appearances. In 1554, we learn, John Knox put some deeply troubling questions about the limits of obligation to Heinrich Bulling and in 1530 Lutheran theologians are found still completely unable to overcome their scruples about the idea of forcible resistance. But mostly we follow the speakers rather than the listeners. No doubt part of the reason for this is (as so often in history) that we have plenty of records of the utterers and few of the hearers. Yet the result is that we come away without any real sense of the strangeness of the world he is describing.

There is a further way in which the abstract thesis that the history of political ideas must be a history of ideologies inhibits Skinner's sensitivity to his material. The early Lutheran arguments he deals with are recognizably moral, developed from shared premises, which are usually theological. Some of the later Calvinist arguments, however, are of a distinctly different character: instead of asking what people ought to do, these arguments are concerned to redefine the world. Thus a Calvinist called Goodman is said to arrive 'at his most revolutionary political claim: since the ruler... is nothing more than a felonious private citizen, he may be lawfully resisted by any or all of his own subjects, since God at this point "gives the sword into the people's hand"'. 48 Now this transportation of moral argument into pseudo-philosophical redefinition is what we sometimes distinguish as 'ideological' in another sense of that very slippery term. The methodological postulate of the ubiquity of ideology dulls the sense that something interestingly new is here happening to human thought.

IV

I wish to conclude by developing the point about excess theoretical baggage. What is the significance of theorizing thought in terms of speech-acts, conventions, contexts and the rest? In part, as we have seen, it is to allow history to get a grip upon properly historical materials rather than sliding off the glassy surface of abstractions. Such theories stress the dependence of a thinker upon his society to the exclusion of the independence which thought also exhibits, and which is why thoughts change. The effect of the theory invoked by Skinner is to emphasize the limitations on thought. How far is he prepared to push these limitations?

The point may be illustrated by Skinner's use of a familiar type of modern argument:

Consider the following imaginary but familiar social situation: a public meeting at which one delegate is repeatedly prevented from speaking by the chairman and eventually leaves before the meeting is concluded. The action constitutes the 'text' we are asked to explain. Confronted with this request, we might well be tempted to theorize about the agent's likely emotions and to explain his act of leaving the room as the outcome of anger or frustration. This account only 'makes sense', however, in the light of two further assumptions about the situation which are left inexplicit in this type of motive explanation. One is that to invoke anger as the motive refers us to the general idea that this particular emotion (or something like it) constitutes a natural or fitting response by the agent to the circumstances. The other is that the agent's action constitutes a natural or fitting expression of this emotion in the circumstances.

If we do make sense of our hypothesis in this way, we shall, as Skinner recognizes, find ourselves 'moving in an interpretative circle' and hardly a circle (we may add) worth the dalliance at that. If, however, we were historians, we would hardly bother with intuitions about the fitting at all, because we know that people often don't do the fitting thing. But we would be extremely wary about the important point which is taken for granted in Skinner's account: namely, that there is some connection between the agent's being prevented from speaking and his walking out of the room. It is precisely this sort of connection which historians often get wrong, and which no amount of methodology will automatically correct. My main point here, however, is to observe Skinner's tendency to assimilate acts to social forms: we are confident in this case, he tells us, in seeing 'a recognizable (and virtually conventional) form of protest... Is an actor actually limited to such forms in his behaviour? It sometimes seems that he is: for it is 'an unexceptionable claim that any agent who is engaged in an intended act of communication must be limited by the prevailing conventions of discourse', But languages and conventions are in fact resources of speech and action, as Skinner seems to recognize immediately by going on to say that agents are not limited merely to following conventions since they may also extend them, or subvert them or alter them. But if this is true, why say that conventions limit people at all?

One answer might be that it is convenient to the historian to have such fixed rules because they give him a handle in explaining otherwise puzzling acts. Convenience, of course, is not necessarily a good guide to truth, and anyway, a more portentous explanation would seem to emerge from Skinner's writings. Consider a remark from 'Meaning and Understanding': '... it is a commonplace we are all Marxists to this extent that our own society places unrecognized constraints upon our imaginations. It deserves, then, to become a commonplace that the historical study of the ideas of other societies should be undertaken as the indispensable and irreplaceable means of placing limits on those constraints. This is, of course, one of those odd doctrines which cannot even be exemplified without refuting itself, since if someone tells me a specific something I cannot imagine here in the twentieth century, then he has already imagined it. It would indeed be absurd to think that at any time we could imagine everything (whatever that might mean) and it is certainly true that men of earlier centuries and cultures did not imagine many things; and perhaps we may even, in retrospect, discover patterns in the things which their imaginations did encompass. But that the reason for this is that they were subject to a 'limitation', and that this limitation was imposed upon them by something called 'society' is not a doctrine that can be extracted from history; and it would seem bad sociology and worse philosophy, according to how it might be construed. We would do better to emphasize as Martin Hollis does in his discussion with Skinner that conventions, and the stock of culture at any time, constitute a resource, something which enables rather than restricts.

There seems little doubt, then, that Skinner has consistently cultivated a sense of the supposedly inescapable limits within which men must act, and that this interpretation is shared by those most closely associated with him.

Thus John Dunn's reading of the Foundations emphasizes a doctrine which is hardly explicit in the pages of the history itself: "The European intellectuals whom Skinner studies pace restlessly, century after century, the bounds of a narrow imaginative cage. The conceptual materials available to them derive from a tiny range of intellectual sources: Roman history, Roman law, Augustinian theology, Greek moral philosophy, Roman literature; and the political importunities which confront them never let them rest ... more sophisticated thinking, in the face of these importunities, proves just as much as before to be thinking under very fierce constraints.' And then we learn that, while the likes of Machiavelli and Bodin 'in some measure' escape from the cage, we ought to consider the possibility that we too are also constrained,

The form in which this ceaseless preoccupation surfaces in Skinner's methodology is relatively innocent because it refers to a world of ultimate deterministic explanations: 'While our explanation needs to start with meanings and motives, it only ends when we have identified the under-lying conditions which caused Romeo [in the example being discussed by Skinner and Hollis] to come into the possession of the motive which then prompted him (caused him?) to act'. There are some perfectly good historians who think that everything that happens falls out according to God's providential ordering; and there are also historians who believe that ultimately all thoughts emerge from the class-determined dynamics of the social system. These are harmless bees in the bonnet so long as such historians do not substitute such convictions for the under-labouring work of actually studying the circumstances and events that concern the historian. Skinner's metaphysical determinism seems to function in the same way, and we may be grateful that it ticks away harmlessly in the form of a conviction about ultimates. It is no doubt responsible for that occasional messianic tone in which he assumes his methodology to have provided 'the means the only sure means of explaining change and innovation' and in which he seems to be summoning us to a promised land of historical understanding as yet merely glimpsed. But we should essentially be grateful for an historical sense which, while discovering 'ideological superstructures' in the past goes on to insist that one cannot 'treat these ideological superstructures as a straightforward outcome of their social base'. Most of his methodology emphasizes the free and creative aspects of thought responding to the world, rather than becoming entangled in tendentious convictions about base and superstructure which would only bow the neck of a serious historian. There is some excess baggage in the hold, but fortunately he mostly works from his cabin bag.