Volume I: General Introduction Acknowledgments Notes on the text 1. Introduction: seeing things their way 2. The practice of history and the cult of the fact 3. Interpretation, rationality and truth 4. Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas 5. Motives, intentions and interpretation 6. Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts 7. 'Social meaning' and the explanation of social action 8. Moral principles and social change 9. The idea of a cultural lexicon 10. Retrospect: Studying rhetoric and conceptual change. Volume II. 1. Introduction 2. The rediscovery of republican values 3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government 4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics 5. Republican virtues in an age of princes 6. Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance of liberty 7. The idea of negative liberty: Machiavelli and modern perspectives 8. Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility 9. Was there a Calvinist theory of revolution? 10. Moral ambiguity and the renaissance art of eloquence 11. John Milton and the politics of slavery 12. Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war 13. From the state of princes to the modern state 14. Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought. Volume III: 1. Introduction: Hobbes's career in philosophy 2. Hobbes and the studia humanitatis 3. Hobbes's changing conception of a civil science 4. Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality 5. Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state 6. Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty 7. Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter 8. History and ideology in the English revolution 9. The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation 10. Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy 11. Hobbes and his disciples in France and England 12. Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society 13. Hobbes's last word on politics.

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Visions of Politics

h AM MOST GRATEFUL to Professors Schochet and Wiener not just for their generosity in commenting on my work, but also for their accuracy in reporting my arguments and their perceptiveness as critics. It seems possible to respond to their remarks in one of two ways. One would be to pursue the implications of Wiener's article and try to provide some more historical information about the context of Hobbes's political thought. This strikes me as an attractive alternative, especially since I agree with his suggestion that I ought to devote more attention to analysing the nature of the social pressures which helped to prompt Hobbes and his sympathisers to espouse their peculiar brand of absolutism. (He does not mention, however, that this theme has already been brilliantly explored by K. V. Thomas, 1965.) The other alternative is to say something more about my general approach to the study of political theory, of which my work on Hobbes (as Schochet and Wiener both acknowledge) has mainly been intended to serve as an example. This strikes me as even more attractive, and it is this line of argument which I shall pursue.

background or methods

III. Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action

In 1967, Robert Merton both reaffirmed his distinction between the “history” and “systematics” of sociological theory and lamented the failure of his colleagues to observe it. Since then, however, the influence of what Merton called the “new history of science” (e.g. Thomas Kuhn) has been felt in the historiography of anthropology ( e. g. George W. Stocking, Jr.), political theory (e. Quentin Skinner), and, more recently, in sociology. It is thus possible to speak optimistically of a “new history of sociology” that is, in Merton’s phrase, “authentically historical.” A summary of this literature is presented. Since the value of this new history for sociology itself is avowedly different from that of its “systematic” counterpart, the alternative functions of “authentic histories” of sociology are discussed in the conclusion.

The New History of Sociology

Our examination of the controversy surrounding the intentionalist conception of textual interpretation shows that the critics of this approach to questions of meaning and interpretation have so far failed to prove their case. The standard objections to intentionalism, on grounds of logical or empirical fallacy, cannot be maintained. We reconstruct the objections which have been raised in the literature against the intentional conception and discuss them as criticism of a conception hold to be inadequate with respect to the problem of literary interpretation. In our evaluation of the intentional conception we conclude that it represents a perfectly ‘normal’ conception of meaning and interpretation, of a kind by no means inferior to other approaches adopted by the various disciplines concerned with interpreting texts.

Der 'intentionale fehlschluß' — ein dogma?

How do we go about understanding the « classic texts » of sociological theory ? This paper begins by reviewing the historicist position of Jones, with its foundations in the work of Quentin Skinner and other historians of political theory. This position then is criticized from the standpoint of the neo-Deweyan pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Specifically, Rorty's pragmatism encourages the AA. to revise Skinner's and Jone's historicism on 3 specific points : the acceptance of treatments of classical texts that are undeniably anachronistic but nonetheless unobjectivable ; the restriction of Skinner's notion of an agent's « privileged acces » to his or her intentions ; and the adoption of a view of the history of sociological theory as a succession of vocabularies. The last point is articulated in a concrete example of the interpretation of one of Durkheim's most characteristic arguments : to treat social facts « as things ».

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Citations

Visions of Politics

III. Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action

The New History of Sociology

Der 'intentionale fehlschluß' — ein dogma?

Durkheim, language, and history: A pragmatist perspective

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