History and Theory 

About: History and Theory is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Historiography & Philosophy of history. It has an ISSN identifier of 0018-2656. Over the lifetime, 1435 publications have been published receiving 53578 citations.

Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The contours of high modernity 2. The self: ontological security and existential anxiety 3. The trajectory of the self 4. Fate, risk, and security 5. The sequestration of experience 6. Tribulations of the self 7. The emergence of life politics Notes Glossary of concepts Index.

Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas

Abstract: ed from it and more readily communicated. To write a textbook in the history of ideas, of course, is simply to fall prey systematically to this temptation which, incidentally, is why textbooks in the subject are not merely poor things, but are actively misleading, and why this difficulty is not to be circumvented even by providing textbooks in which the "message" is given in the author's own words. The inevitable result which can be illustrated from far more respectable sources than the synoptic and pedagogic histories will still be a form of writing which might be labelled the mythology of coherence. The writing of the history of ethical and political philosophy is pervaded by this mythology.69 Thus if "current scholarly opinion" can see no coherence in Hooker's Laws, the moral is to look harder, for "coherence" is surely "present."70 If there is doubt about the "most central themes" of Hobbes's political philosophy, it becomes the duty of 'the exegete to discover the "inner coherence of his doctrine" by reading the Leviathan a number of times, until in a perhaps excessively revealing phrase he finds that its argument has "assumed some coherence."'7' If there is no coherent system "readily accessible" to the student of Hume's political works, the exegete's duty is "to rummage through one work after another" until the "high degree 69. A similar point about the problem of accommodating different "levels of abstraction" has been made by J. G. A. Pocock, "The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry," in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series, ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford, 1962), 183-202. This "scripturalist tendency" is also mentioned by Peter Laslett sub "Political Philosophy, History of," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards et al., 8 vols. (New York, 1967), VI, 371. 70. Arthur S. McGrade, "The Coherence of Hooker's Polity: The Books on Power," Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963), 163. 71. Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford, 1957), vii. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.210 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 06:00:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 17 of consistency in the whole corpus" is duly displayed (again in a rather revealing phrase) "at all costs."72 If Herder's political ideas are "rarely worked out systematically," and are to be found "scattered throughout his writings, sometimes within the most unexpected contexts," the duty of the exegete again becomes that of trying "to present these ideas in some coherent form."73 The most revealing fact about such reiterations of the scholar's task is that the metaphors habitually used are those of effort and quest; the ambition is always to "arrive" at "a unified interpretation," to "gain" a "coherent view of an author's system."74 This procedure gives the thoughts of various classic writers a coherence, and an air generally of a closed system, which they may never have attained or even been meant to attain. If it is first assumed, for example, that the business of interpreting Rousseau's thought must center on the discovery of his most "fundamental thought," it will readily cease to seem a matter of importance that he contributed over several decades to several quite different fields of enquiry.75 Again, if it is first assumed that every aspect of Hobbes's thought was designed as a contribution to the whole of his "Christian" system, it will cease to seem at all peculiar to suggest that we may turn to his autobiography to elucidate so crucial a point as the relations between ethics and political life.76 Again, if it is first assumed that even Burke never essentially contradicted himself or changed his mind, but that a "coherent moral philosophy" underlies everything he wrote, then it will cease to seem at all unrealistic to treat "the corpus of his published writings" as "a single body of thought."77 Some measure of the lengths to which such procedures of abstracting the variety of a man's thoughts to the level at which they can be said (all passion spent) to "attain" some coherence is provided by a recent study of Marx's social and political thought. Here it has seemed necessary, to justify the exclusion of Engels's thoughts, to point out that Marx and Engels were after all "two distinct human beings."78 It does sometimes happen, of course, that the aims and successes of a given writer may remain so 72. John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York, 1963), v-vi. 73. F. M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought (Oxford, 1965), xix. Cf. also 139. 74. E.g., J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas (London, 1965), 10. 75. Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, tr. and ed. Peter Gay (Bloomington, Indiana, 1954), 46, 62. As Gay indicates in his Introduction, it may well have been salutary at the time when Cassirer was writing to have insisted on such an emphasis, but it remains questionable whether the somewhat a priori assumptions of the study are not misconceived. 76. F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1964), 28. 77. Charles Parkin, The Moral Basis of Burke's Political Thought (Cambridge, 1956), 2, 4. 78. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968), 3. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.210 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 06:00:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms