Cambridge School Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The Cambridge school refers to that coterie of intellectual historians educated at Cambridge University, chief among whom were Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, whose work emphasized the importance of various contexts to the study of political thought. They sought by their approach to offer a new interpretation of the history of political thought that would avoid the confusions to which, they alleged, prevailing texualist modes of interpretation, above all, were prone.

Recent accounts of the school’s genesis identify the work of Cambridge historian Peter Laslett as seminal to its creation. Laslett, who in 1949 published an edition of Sir Robert Filmer’s (1588–1653) Patriarcha, showed in his research that Filmer’s Patriarcha had been composed perhaps as early as 1630 but only published in 1679 to 1680, whereas his other writings had appeared in 1648.Thus Laslett pointed to “three contexts,” or historical moments, that had to be considered before the historian could comprehend “what [Filmer] had intended and how he had been understood” at the time. Laslett subsequently established, with the publication in 1960 of his critical edition of John Locke’s (1632–1704) Treatises on Government, that the Treatises had been written perhaps as early as 1681, several years before Locke published them anonymously in 1689.The setting of this date called into question the thesis that Locke’s intention in writing the Treatises had been to make a post hoc apology for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and permitted historians to consider the possibility that he had intended to advocate rebellion in England from the outset.

The emphasis Laslett’s work placed on context provided by certain historical moments strongly influenced J. G. A. Pocock, a New Zealand–born graduate student then at Cambridge University under the tutelage of historian Herbert Butterfield. Pocock’s dissertation, expanded and published as The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law in 1957, declared itself to be an effort in the history of historiography, a term he would later apply to his life’s work, but his best known and most influential contribution to the history of political thought would prove to be The Machiavellian Moment. First appearing in 1975, it argued for the existence of a continuity between the political thought of Machiavelli—seen as issuing in the revival of a “republican ideal” taken from Aristotle—and the “civic consciousness” of Puritan England and America during the Revolution. After holding teaching posts in New Zealand, Pocock emigrated to the United States, eventually settling at Johns Hopkins University, where in the mid-2000s he was the Harry C. Black Professor of History Emeritus.

Quentin Skinner, shortly after becoming a Fellow at Christ’s Church College in Cambridge in 1962, published several articles on interpretive and methodological questions, the most important of which, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” became the “manifesto of an emerging method” and closely associated with the approach of the Cambridge school as a whole. In “Meaning and Understanding,” Skinner attacked textualist approaches to the history of political thought for often issuing in anachronism through neglect of external evidence crucial to interpretation of texts. Thus, for example, scholars who ignored the fact that contemporaries of Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Bayle had understood their intention “to deal both ironically and destructively with the prevailing theological orthodoxies” were in danger of erecting mythologies rather than writing histories of political thought. Likewise, Skinner criticized contextualizes for wrongly presuming their accounts of social contexts and conditions as sufficient to supply an understanding of authorial intent. Instead, he stressed the importance of attending to the manner in which a word or idea was used in a given context, believing such recourse to linguistic conventions would reveal whether and to what extent political theorists adhered to or departed from the regnant ideas of their time. Accordingly, in his 1978 The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Skinner sought to “construct a general framework within which the writings of the more prominent theorists can then be situated” and more fully understood. In 1996, Skinner became the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University.

Bibliography:

Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
“Quentin Skinner:The History of Politics and the Politics of History.” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 532–550.
“Present at the Creation:With Laslett to the Lost Worlds.” International Journal of Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (2006): 7–17.
Skinner, Quentin. “The Limits of Historical Explanations.” Philosophy 4 (1966): 199–215.
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
“Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53.
Tarcov, Nathan. “Quentin Skinner’s Method and Machiavelli’s Prince.” Ethics 92, no. 4 (July 1982): 692–709.
Tully, James, ed. Meaning in Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.