This almost naïve ahistoricism was bound to produce a reaction, and a very different school of thought emerged, which has since overtaken its rivals. What has come to be called the Cambridge School appears, at least on the face of it, to go to the other extreme by radically historicizing the works, great and small, of political theory and denying them any wider meaning beyond the very local moment of their creation. The most effective exponent of this approach, Quentin Skinner, in the introduction to his classic text, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, gives an account of his method that seems directly antithetical to the dichotomies on which the ahistorical approach was based, against the sharp distinction between political philosophy and ideology and the facile opposition of ‘empirical’ to ‘normative’. In fact, argues Skinner, we can best understand the history of political theory by treating it essentially as the history of ideologies, and this requires a detailed contextualization. ‘For I take it that political life itself sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to appear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate.’6
The principal benefit of this approach, Skinner writes, is that it equips us ‘with a way of gaining greater insight into its author’s meaning than we can ever hope to achieve simply from reading the text itself “over and over again” as the exponents of the “textualist” approach have characteristically proposed.’7 But there is also another advantage:
It will now be evident why I wish to maintain that, if the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice. For it now appears that, in recovering the terms of the normative vocabulary available to any given agent for the description of his political behaviour, we are at the same time indicating one of the constraints upon his behaviour itself. This suggests that, in order to explain why such an agent acts as he does, we are bound to make some reference to this vocabulary, since it evidently figures as one of the determinants of his action. This in turn suggests that, if we were to focus our histories on the study of these vocabularies, we might be able to illustrate the exact ways in which the explanation of political behaviour depends upon the study of political thought.
Skinner then proceeded to construct a history of Western political thought in the Renaissance and the age of Reformation, especially the notion of the state as it acquired its modern meaning, by exploring the political vocabularies available to political thinkers and actors and the specific sets of questions that history had put on their agenda. His main strategy, here as elsewhere in his work, was to cast his net more widely than historians of political thought have customarily done, considering not just the leading theorists but, as he put it, ‘the more general social and intellectual matrix out of which their works arose’.8 He looked not only at the work of the greats but also at more ‘ephemeral contemporary contributions to social and political thought’, as a means of gaining access to the available vocabularies and the prevailing assumptions about political society that were shaping debate in specific times and places.
Skinner’s approach has certain very clear strengths; and other members of the Cambridge School have also applied these principles, often very effectively, to the analysis of specific thinkers or ‘traditions of discourse’, especially those of early modern England. The proposition that the political questions addressed by political theorists, including the great ones, are thrown up by real political life and are shaped by the historical conditions in which they arise seems hardly more nor less than good common sense.
But much depends on what the Cambridge School regards as a relevant context, and it soon becomes clear that contextualization has a different meaning than might be inferred from Skinner’s reference to the ‘social and intellectual matrix’. It turns out that the ‘social’ matrix has little to do with ‘society’, the economy, or even the polity. The social context is itself intellectual, or at least the ‘social’ is defined by, and only by, existing vocabularies. The ‘political life’ that sets the agenda for theory is essentially a language game. In the end, to contextualize a text is to situate it among other texts, among a range of vocabularies, discourses and ideological paradigms at various levels of formality, from the classics of political thought down to ephemeral screeds or political speeches. What emerges from Skinner’s assault on purely textual histories or the abstract history of ideas is yet another kind of textual history, yet another history of ideas – certainly more sophisticated and comprehensive than what went before, but hardly less limited to disembodied texts.
A catalogue of what is missing from Skinner’s comprehensive history of political ideas from 1300 to 1600 reveals quite starkly the limits of his ‘contexts’. Skinner is dealing with a period marked by major social and economic developments, which loomed very large in the theory and practice of European political thinkers and actors. Yet there is in his book no substantive consideration of agriculture, the aristocracy and peasantry, land distribution and tenure, the social division of labour, social protest and conflict, population, urbanization, trade, commerce, manufacture, and the burgher class.9
It is true that the other major founding figure of the Cambridge School, J.G.A. Pocock, is, on the face of it, more interested in economic developments and what appear to be material factors, like the ‘discovery’ (in Pocock’s words) of capital and the emergence of ‘commercial society’ in eighteenth-century Britain. Yet his account of this ‘sudden and traumatic discovery’ is, in its way, even more divorced from historical processes than Skinner’s account of the state.10 The critical moment for Pocock is the foundation of the Bank of England, which, he argues, brought about a complete transformation of property, the transformation of its structure and morality, with ‘spectacular abruptness’ in the mid-1690s; and it was accompanied by sudden changes in the psychology of politics. But in this argument, the Bank of England, and indeed commercial society, seem to have no history at all. They suddenly emerge full-grown, as if the transformations of property and social relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the formation of English agrarian capitalism, or the distinctively English banking system associated with the development of capitalist property which preceded the foundation of the national bank, had no bearing on their consolidation in the commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century. Such a strikingly ahistorical account is possible only because, for Pocock perhaps even more than for Skinner, history has little to do with social processes, and historical transformations are manifest only as visible shifts in the languages of politics. Changes in discourse that represent the culmination and consolidation of a social transformation are presented as its origin and cause.
So, what purports to be the history of political thought, for both Pocock and Skinner, is curiously ahistorical, not only in its failure to grapple with what on any reckoning were decisive historical developments in the relevant periods but also in its lack of process. Characteristically, history for the Cambridge School is a series of disconnected, very local and particular episodes, such as specific political controversies in specific times and places, which have no apparent relation to more inclusive social developments or to any historical process, large or small.11
This emphasis on the local and particular does not, however, preclude consideration of larger spans of time and space. The ‘traditions of discourse’ that are the stuff of the Cambridge