Wesleyan University
Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas
Author(s): Quentin Skinner
Source:
History and Theory,
Vol. 8, No. 1 (1969), pp. 3-53
Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504188
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MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING
IN THE HISTORY
OF IDEAS
QUENTIN
SKINNER
My
aim
is to consider what
I
take to
be
the basic
question
which
necessarily
arises whenever an historian of ideas' confronts
a work which
he
hopes
to
understand. Such an historian may have focused his attention on
a work of
literature
-
a poem, a play, a novel
-
or on a work of philosophy
-
some
exercise in ethical, political, religious, or
other
such mode of
thought.
But
the basic question will in all such cases remain the
same: what
are
the
appropriate procedures to adopt in the attempt to arrive
at an
understanding
of
the work? There are of course two currently orthodox (though conflicting)
answers to this question, both of which seem to command a wide acceptance.
The first (which is perhaps being increasingly adopted by historians of ideas)
insists that it is the context "of religious, political, and economic factors"
which
determines the meaning of any given text, and so must provide "the
ultimate framework" for any attempt to understand it. The other orthodoxy,
however, (still perhaps the most generally accepted) insists on the autonomy
of
the text itself as the sole necessary key to its own meaning, and so dis-
misses any attempt to reconstitute the "total context" as "gratuitous, and
worse."
My
concern
in
what
follows will
be to consider
these two
orthodoxies in
turn,
and
to
argue
that
both
in effect
share
the
same basic
inadequacy:
1. For an
analysis
of the
now
confusing
variety
of
ways
in which
this
inescapable
phrase
has
been
used, see Maurice
Mandelbaum,
"The
History
of
Ideas,
Intellectual
History,
and
the
History
of
Philosophy"
in
The
Historiography of
the
History
of
Phi-
losophy,
Beiheft 5,
History
and
Theory
(1965),
33n. I use
the
term
here
consistently,
but
with
deliberate
vagueness,
simply
to refer to as wide
as
possible
a
variety
of his-
torical
inquiries
into intellectual
problems.
2. I
take
these
quotations
from
one of the
many
confrontations in the
debate
among
literary
critics
between the "scholars" and the "critics."
The
terms
and
issues
of this
debate
seem
to be
repeated in
an
identical
(though
less
conscious)
manner
in
histories
of
philosophical
ideas. It is from the latter
disciplines,
however,
that
I
have
mainly
taken
my
examples.
I
have tried,
moreover,
in
all cases
to restrict
my
examples to
works
which
are
either
classic
or
in current
use.
The
fact
that a
majority of
these are
taken
from
the
history
of
political ideas
merely
reflects
my own
specialism. The
belief
in
"contextual
reading"
being
voiced
here is
by
F.
W.
Bateson,
"The
Functions of
Criticism at
the Present
Time,"
Essays
in Criticism
3
(1953),
16.
The
contrary
belief
in the
text
itself as
"something
determinate" is from F.
R.
Leavis, "The
Responsible
Critic:
or the
Functions of
Criticism
at
any
Time,"
Scrutiny 19
(1953),
173.
4
QUENTIN
SKINNER
neither approach
seems
a
sufficient or
even
appropriate
means of
achieving
a
proper
understanding of
any given
literary or
philosophical work.
Both
methodologies, it can be
shown,
commit philosophical
mistakes
in
the
assump-
tions
they
make about
the
conditions
necessary for the
understanding of
utterances. It
follows that
the result
of
accepting either
orthodoxy has
been
to
fill
the
current literature
in the
history of ideas
with a
series of
conceptual
muddles and
mistaken
empirical
claims.
The
attempt
to
substantiate this
assertion
must
necessarily be
somewhat
critical
and
negative. I
undertake it
here,
however, in the
belief that
it can
be
shown to
yield much
more
positive and
programmatic
conclusions; for
the
nature of
the current
confusions
in the
history of ideas
points not
merely
to
the
need for
an
alternative
approach,
but
also indicates
what
type
of
approach must
necessarily
be adopted
if such confusions
are to be
avoided.
I
believe
that
this
alternative approach
would be
more
satisfactory as
history,
and
moreover that
it would
serve
to invest
the
history of
ideas with its own
philosophical
point.
I
turn first to
consider
the
methodology
dictated by the
claim that
the text
itself
should
form the
self-sufficient
object of
inquiry
and
understanding.
For
it
is this
assumption
which
continues to
govern the
largest
number of
studies, to
raise the
widest
philosophical
issues, and to
give rise
to the
largest number
of
confusions. This
approach
itself is
logically tied,
in the
history of
ideas no less
than in more
strictly
literary
studies,
to a
particular
form of
justification
for
conducting
the
study
itself. The
whole
point,
it is
characteristically said,
of
studying past
works of
philosophy (or
literature)
must
be
that
they
contain
(in
a favored
phrase)
"timeless
elements,"'3
in
the
form of
"universal ideas,"4 even
a
"dateless wisdom"5 with
"universal
applica-
tion."6
Now
the
historian
who
adopts
such a
view
has
already
committed
himself,
in
effect,
on
the
question
of how best
to
gain
an
understanding
of
such
3. Peter H.
Merkl,
Political
Continuity
and
Change
(New York,
1967),
3.
For the
"perennial
configurations"
of the classic texts and their
"perennial
problems"
cf.
also
Hans
J.
Morgenthau,
Dilemmas
of
Politics
(Chicago,
1958), 1, and
Mulford Q.
Sibley,
"The
Place of
Classical
Theory
in the
Study
of
Politics"
in
Approaches
to
the
Study of
Politics, ed. Roland
Yound
(Chicago,
1958), 133, (a
volume
which
includes
many
other
similar
claims).
4.
William
T.
Bluhm,
Theories
of
the Political
System
(Englewood
Cliffs,
New
Jer-
sey,
1965), 13.
5. 0.
E. C.
Catlin,
A
History of
Political
Philosophy
(London,
1950),
x.
6.
Andrew
Hacker,
"Capital and
Carbuncles:
the 'Great
Books'
Reappraised,"
American
Political Science
Review 48
(1954), 783.
THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
5
"classic texts."7 For if the whole point of such a
study is conceived in terms
of recovering the "timeless questions and answers"
posed in the "great books,"
and so of demonstrating their continuing "relevance,"8
it must be not merely
possible, but essential, for the historian to
concentrate simply on what each
of
the classic writers has said9 about each of these
"fundamental concepts"
and
"abiding questions."10 The aim, in short, must
be to provide "a re-ap-
praisal of the classic writings, quite apart from
the context of historical
development, as perennially important attempts to set
down universal prop-
ositions
about
political reality."1 For to suggest instead that
a
knowledge
of
the
social context is a necessary condition for an
understanding
of the
classic texts is equivalent to denying that they do
contain any elements of
timeless and perennial interest, and is thus equivalent
to removing the whole
point of studying what they said.
It
is
this essential belief
that
each
of the
classic writers
may
be
expected
to consider and explicate some determinate
set of "fundamental
concepts"
of
"perennial
interest" which seems to be
the basic
source of the confusions
engendered by
this
approach to studying
the
history
of
either
literary
or
philosophical
ideas. The
sense in which the belief
is
misleading, however,
appears
to
be
somewhat elusive. It is
easy
to
castigate
the
assumption
as
"a
fatal
mistake,"12
but it is
equally easy
to insist that it must in some
sense
be
a
necessary
truth.
For there can be no
question
that the histories of
different
intellectual
pursuits
are
marked
by
the
employment
of
some
"fairly
stable
vocabulary"13
of characteristic
concepts.
Even if we hold
to
the
fashionably
7. I employ this unlovely expression throughout,
since it is
habitually
used
by
all
his-
torians of ideas, with
an
apparently
clear
reference
to an
accepted
"canon" of
texts.
8. For the insistence that the study of "classic texts" must "find its major justification
in relevancy," see R. G. McCloskey, "American Political Thought and the Study
of
Politics,"
American
Political Science
Review
51
(1957),
129.
For
the
"timeless
questions
and answers" see all the textbooks, and,
for
a
more
general precept, see
Hacker's
article,
cited in fn. 6, at p. 786.
9. For the need to concentrate on what each classic writer says, see for precept, K.
Jaspers, The Great Philosophers
I
(London, 1962), Foreword,
and
Leonard
Nelson,
"What
is
the History
of
Philosophy?"
Ratio
4
(1962),
32-33.
For this
assumption
in
practice, see
for
example
N. R.
Murphy,
The
Interpretation of
Plato's
Republic (Oxford,
1951), v,
on "what Plato
said";
Alan
Ryan,
"Locke
and the
Dictatorship
of the Bour-
geoisie," Political Studies 13 (1965), 219, on
"what
Locke said";
Leo
Strauss,
On
Tyranny (New York, 1948), 7,
on
Xenophon
and "what he himself
says."
10. For "fundamental concepts," see for example Charles
R. N.
McCoy,
The
Struc-
ture of Political Thought (New York, 1963), 7. For "abiding questions" see for example
the Preface
to
History of Political Philosophy,
ed.
Leo Strauss and
J.
Cropsey (Chicago,
1963).
11.
Bluhm, Theories of
the
Political System,
v.
12. Alasdair
MacIntyre,
A
Short
History of
Ethics
(New York, 1966),
2.
The
remarks
made in this Introduction, however, are extremely perceptive and relevant.
13. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics
and Vision
(London, 1961), 27. The opening chapter
gives a sensitive account of "the vocabulary of political philosophy," esp. 11-17.
6
QUENTIN
SKINNER
loose-textured
theory that
it is only in
virtue of
certain
"family
resemblances"
that
we are
able to define
and
delineate such
different
activities, we
are still
committed to
accepting
some
criteria and
rules of usage
such that
certain
performances
can be
correctly
instanced, and
others
excluded, as
examples
of
a
given
activity.
Otherwise we
should
eventually have
no
means -let
alone
justification
-for
delineating
and
speaking, say,
of
the
histories
of
ethical or
political
thinking as
being histories
of recognizable
activities
at
all. It
is
in
fact
the truth,
and not
the
absurdity, of the claim that
all
such
activities must
have some
characteristic
concepts which
seems
to
provide
the
main
source of
confusion. For
if there
must be at
least some
family
resemblance
connecting all
the
instances of a
given
activity,
which we need
first
of all to
apprehend
in order to
recognize
the activity
itself, it
becomes
impossible for
any
observer to
consider any
such
activity, or any
instance
of
it,
without
having some
preconceptions
about what he
expects to
find.
The
relevance of this
dilemma to
the
history of ideas
-
and
especially
to
the claim
that the
historian
should
concentrate
simply on the
text in
itself
-
is of
course that
it will
never in fact
be
possible simply
to study
what
any given
classic
writer has said
(especially
in an
alien culture)
without
bringing to
bear some of
one's own
expectations about what
he
must have
been
saying.
The is
simply the
dilemma,
familiar to
psychologists
as the
(apparently
inescapable)
14
determining factor
of the
observer's
mental set.
By
our
past
experience
"we are set to
perceive
details in a certain
way."
And
when
this
frame of
reference has
been
established, "the
process is
one of
being prepared to
perceive
or react
in a
certain
way."',5
The
resulting
dilemma
may
be stated, for
my present
purposes,
in
the
formally
crucial
but
empirically
very
elusive
proposition
that these
models
and
preconceptions
in
terms
of
which
we
unavoidably
organize
and
adjust
our
perceptions
and
thoughts
will
themselves
tend
to
act as determinants of
what
we think
or
perceive.
We
must
classify in
order to
understand,
and
we
can
only
classify the
unfamiliar
in terms of the
familiar."6
The
perpetual
danger,
in our
attempts
to
enlarge
our
historical
understanding,
is
thus
that
our
expectations
about
what
some-
one must
be
saying
or
doing
will themselves
determine
that
we
understand
the
agent
to be
doing
something
which
he would
not
-
or
even
could
not
himself
have
accepted
as
an
account of
what
he
was
doing.
This
notion
of
the
priority
of
paradigms
has
already
been
very
fruitfully
14.
Floyd
H.
Allport,
Theories
of
Perception
and the
Concept
of
Structure
(New
York,
1955)
illustrates
the
way
in which
the
concept
of set
"ramifies
into
all
phases
of
perceptual
study"
(240),
and recurs
in otherwise
contrasting
theories.
15.
Allport, Theories
of
Perception,
239.
16. That
this
must
result
in a
history
of
philosophy
conceived
in
terms
of
our
own
philosophical
criteria and interests
(whose
else?)
is
fully
brought
out
in
John
Dunn,
"The
Identity of
the
History
of
Ideas,"
Philosophy
43
(1968),
97-98.