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How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2020

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Abstract

This paper proposes a new framework for categorizing approaches to the history of political thought. Previous categorizations exclude much research; political theory, if included, is often caricatured. And previous categorizations are one-dimensional, presenting different approaches as alternatives. My framework is two-dimensional, distinguishing six kinds of end (two empirical, four theoretical) and six kinds of means. Importantly, these choices are not alternatives: studies may have more than one end and typically use several means. Studies with different ends often use some of the same means. And all studies straddle the supposed empirical/theoretical “divide.” Quentin Skinner himself expertly combines empirical and theoretical analysis—yet the latter is often overlooked, not least because of Skinner's own methodological pronouncements. This highlights a curious disjuncture in methodological writings, between what they say we do, and what we should do. What we should do is much broader than existing categorizations imply.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , Winter 2021 , pp. 91 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame.

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Footnotes

For comments and criticisms on previous versions of this article, I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers and to Ruth Abbey, the editor of this journal.

References

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43 See Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 251–57, on empirical and systematic reconstruction.

44 Blau, “History of Political Thought as Detective-Work,” 1179; Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 244–45, 258, 260, 264.

45 Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 260; see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 9.

46 Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 258.

47 Ibid., 251

48 Blau, “History of Political Thought as Detective-Work,” 1189–93.

49 I thank Maurizio Viroli for helping me to see these other categories.

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69 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ix.

70 Ibid., 216.

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73 Ibid., 45.

74 Ibid., 24.

75 Ibid., 112–15.

76 Ibid., 129–31.

77 Ibid., 128; see also 150.

78 Ibid., 132–38; quotation at 132.

79 Ibid., 116–23.

80 Ibid., 112–15.

81 Blau, “Interpreting Texts,” 252–56; Blau, “Extended Meaning,” 352–58; Blau, “Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes”; Blau, “Textual Context.”

82 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 23.

83 Ibid., 34–37, 41–47, 50–55.

84 Ibid., 37–41, 47–50; see also 21–23, 25–34, and 56–81 for other contextual comparisons.

85 Ibid., 90.

86 Ibid., 90–107.

87 Ibid., 107–15.

88 Ibid., 132–38; 162–73.

89 Ibid., 138–62; 173–77.

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