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Without Laslett to the lost worlds: Quentin Skinner's early methodology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2021

Takuya Furuta Open the ORCID record for Takuya Furuta [Opens in a new window]
Takuya Furuta*
Affiliation:
Hiroshima University: Higashi-Hiroshima, Hiroshima7390046, Japan
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: ftakuya@keio.jp
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to suggest that the emergence of the so-called Cambridge School of history of political thought can best be understood in terms of two competing visions of the relationship between history and social science, focusing on Peter Laslett and Quentin Skinner. Although Laslett is often distinguished as a founder of the Cambridge School, this paper suggests an alternative view by emphasizing the theoretical discontinuity between Laslett and Skinner rather than their continuity. Laslett, a practitioner of Karl Manheim's ideas, promoted the idea of a comprehensive scientific social history, within which intellectual history was located. This paper argues that Skinner broke with Laslett's idea. For Skinner, (1) Laslett was a positivist who applied the natural scientific model to intellectual history; (2) Laslett's positivism was actually ‘contextualism’; and (3) the alternative to Laslett's contextualism was the history of ideology. Skinner's early methodology was, in part, a rhetorical redescription of ‘ideology’, which opposed both Mannheim and Laslett. As such, this paper focuses on the discursive disconnection between Laslett and Skinner, thus providing a clue to construct a platform for facilitating a further discussion of the history of ideas and the social sciences.

Keywords

Methodology of history of political thoughtQuentin Skinnerthe Cambridge School
Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 144 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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