1. Introduction
In an interview, the controversial twentieth-century British historian Peter Laslett recounted the founding story of two Cambridge academic groups: the Cambridge School of history of political ideas and The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Laslett employed in his teaching an interdisciplinary approach to political theory and its history, focusing on their relationship to philosophy, economics, sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences. Some of his students and the researchers who attended his seminars, Laslett remarked, came to develop the Cambridge School. Among the attendees were W. G. Runciman, Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, John Pocock, and Philip Abrams. Furthermore, as Laslett recounted, it was through this group's activities that he more fully developed his interest in past social structures; this, in turn, catalysed Laslett to establish The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Laslett, Reference Laslett1989: 127). Laslett saw ‘no discontinuity between the two types of research’; in fact, he had ‘tried to pursue one and the other together at the same time’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett1989: 129).
On the one hand, this Laslettian narrative sounds a familiar story. After all, Laslett has been widely recognized as the propounder of Cambridge contextualism (e.g., Skodo, Reference Skodo2014: 538).Footnote 1 In fact, all core members of the School – Pocock, Dunn, and, above all, Skinner – invariably agree on the importance of Laslett and his works. When Dunn (Reference Dunn1996: 20) referred to the Cambridge School in an encyclopaedia entry for the ‘History of Political Thought’, the first name he mentioned was Laslett. Likewise, Pocock was not reticent about ‘the Laslettian moment’ (Pocock, Reference Pocock, Brett, Tully and Hamilton-Bleakley2006a: 38) while recollecting the Cambridge School's development in ‘Present at the Creation: With Laslett to the Lost Worlds’ (Pocock, Reference Pocock2006b). Skinner (Reference Skinner and Pallares-Burke2002c: 214) was no less willing to admit Laslett's impact on his own research and he openly acknowledged his debt to the historian. Thus, we are now told that their ‘battle against the canonical theorists was (…) initiated by Laslett’ (Bevir, Reference Bevir and Klosko2011: 14) and even that ‘the emergence of Cambridge contextualism as an intellectual tradition can be rightly explained as younger researchers simply picking up Laslett's historical working methods and running with them’ (Koikkalainen, Reference Koikkalainen2011: 317).
On the other hand, however, there is a clear gap in perception between Laslett and Skinner (and the other Cambridge School members). Unlike Laslett, notably, Skinner, Dunn, and Pocock never referred to Runciman and Abrams as Cambridge contextualistsFootnote 2 and commentators also do not place Runciman or Abrams within the Cambridge School tradition. Yet, another revealing gap emerges in an interview with Skinner. Although talking about Laslett scholarship, Skinner noted that Laslett's introduction to Two Treatises of Government was one of the most impressive works he had read during his undergraduate years. In contrast, Skinner confessed that reading Laslett's The World We Have Lost made him feel that Laslett had taken ‘a wrong turning’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner2008: Part 2, 00:15:38). However, from Laslett's perspective, the work must not have been a turnabout at all, but rather a halfway point in his continuous effort to reconstruct the historical context of past intellectual and political activities. Indeed, Laslett claimed that he got irritated when people asked him after his so-called ‘turn’ towards social structure ‘if I am the same Peter Laslett who worked on John Locke and his political philosophy or if it was done by my father, my uncle or anyone who had the same name in the previous generation’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett1989: 129).
The purpose of this paper is to explain this perception gap. This study is, accordingly, a reconsideration on Laslett's position as a founder of the Cambridge School, since this gap suggests that the Cambridge School as we know it is completely different than how Laslett may have expected it to be. Considering Laslett's own recollection, the Cambridge School could have been the ‘Cambridge School for the History of Population, Social Structure and Political Thought’. The Cambridge School members, however, hardly seemed to have a serious interest in studying either social structures or the history of population.
Thus, this paper argues that there must have been an ‘anti-Laslettian moment’ within the Cambridge School's development. I trace this ‘anti-Laslettian’ moment back to Skinner. Although Laslett attempted to incorporate the history of political thought into the history of social structure based on the social sciences, Skinner rejected this vision and attempted to reconstruct the history of political ideas as an indispensable part of political history. This paper suggests that one of the most significant – and indeed most often overlooked – aspects of Skinner's early methodology (in the 1960s and 1970s) was his breaking away from Laslett's vision of intellectual history. By comparing Skinner and Laslett this paper illuminates their previously unnoticed methodological contributions to the history of political theory and social science in general: the Skinnerian methodological ‘thick description’ and the Laslettian moment in the new global and digital age.
Thus, rather than seeking to identify a methodological continuity between Laslett's and Skinner's work (as recent studies have done), this paper emphasizes their theoretical discontinuity. However, some researchers do explore their differences; for example, James Alexander (Reference Alexander2016: 365–366, 368–370) identifies several Cambridge academic traditions, yet classifies Laslett and Skinner into different strands. Additionally, Samuel James (Reference James2019: 96–97) argues that it was Herbert Butterfield, not Laslett, who was John Pocock's main source of inspiration, and so, he implies, Laslett's supposed impact on the emergence of the Cambridge School should be modified. Undoubtedly, Alexander's and James's works are indispensable for those inquiring into the Cambridge School's origin(s). However, neither Alexander's nor James's work investigates the theoretical relationship between Laslett and Skinner, which is the critical gap in scholarship this paper seeks to fill.
Even Bevir and Koikkalainen (who, as I mentioned above, emphasize Skinner's and Laslett's theoretical continuity) address their differences. Working as co-authors, Adcock and Bevir (Reference Adcock, Bevir, Adcock, Bevir and Stimson2007: 230) describe Laslett as both a modernist and an empiricist, while describing Skinner as a modernist but not an empiricist. Koikkalainen (Reference Koikkalainen2011: 319) astutely observes that Skinner did not share Laslett's ambition to reconcile political theory with empirical science.Footnote 3 Nonetheless, in the end, they explained the Cambridge School in terms of the theoretical continuity of Skinner and Laslett, rather than in terms of their differences. One particular feature of the Cambridge School, a linguistic contextualismFootnote 4, is, I think, best understood by exploring Skinner's conscious, intentional departure from Laslett – a fine point of distinction that Bevir and Adcock as well as Koikkalainen recognize but do not fully explore.
In the following discussion, I identify the anti-Laslettian moment in Skinner's early methodology. To that end, in Section 2, I outline Laslett's conception of a scientific approach to constructing a social history and its relation to the history of political thought, focusing on Laslett's reception of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. I then devote the subsequent three sections to illuminating Skinner's endeavour to overcome Laslett's methodology. For Skinner, I will argue, Laslett is a positivist in the sense that he applies the natural scientific model to intellectual history; Laslett's positivism is actually ‘contextualism’, to use Skinner’ term, which holds that social contexts determine the meaning of texts; and Skinner's proposed alternative to Laslett's contextualism is the history of ideology,Footnote 5 as exemplified in Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Thus, insofar as we consider The Foundations a representative work of the Cambridge School, we can claim that the School was founded on a departure from Laslett, rather than on an inheritance of the Laslettian vision of the Cambridge School.
Before presenting my analysis of Laslett's and Skinner's relationship, however, I would like to clarify what it is that I am trying to achieve in this paper. This paper is – to use Carl Hempel's term – to present a kind of ‘explanation sketch’ that points to a direction of further inquiry. As such, a more nuanced description of their relationship will be possible than the following discussion might suggest. When we compare, for example, Laslett's attacks on ‘scripturalist tendency’ and ‘philosophizing tendency’ to Skinner's reproach on ‘textualism’, we can easily identify their commonalities (Laslett and Cummings, Reference Laslett, Cummings and Edwards1967: 371; this part was written by Laslett). My work, however, sheds light on the often overlooked point of departure between these two historians. Furthermore, I suggest that the hypothesis that best explains their differences is that Skinner was actually repudiating Laslett's contextualism in writing his criticism against other historians, such as Keith Thomas, Fernand Braudel, and Lewis Namier. This argument is necessarily somewhat conjectural, since neither Laslett nor Skinner made substantial comments on each other's work. One could point to possible personal or psychological motivations for Skinner's rejection of Laslett's views: Laslett was Skinner's former teacher. However, this paper's argument is constructed on the observable implications of the aforementioned hypothesis rather than psychological inferences. In the following discussion, I demonstrate that Skinner's argument regarding contextualism constituted a significant critique of Laslett's vision of history.
2. Peter Laslett and the sociological history of political thought
Peter Laslett inherited and practiced Karl Mannheim's ideas, a man whom he called ‘one of the most important social thinkers of the earlier twentieth century’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett1979: 223).Footnote 6 Mannheim became widely known in the Anglophone world after 1936, when the English version of Ideology and Utopia was published with a new preface. This book greatly impacted Britain's intellectual milieu, and Laslett belonged to the youngest generation that Mannheim's book directly impacted. According to Mannheim, the sociology of knowledge does not aim primarily at an intrinsic explication and evaluation of a particular idea. Rather, it asks who holds and bears that idea. ‘We consider’, Mannheim observed, ‘not merely the content but also the form, and even the conceptual framework of a mode of thought as a function of the life situation of a thinker’. Thus, according to Mannheim, ideas are not to be seen as autonomous abstractions of detached philosophers, but as ideologies produced by collective thinking, that is, as ‘a function of him who holds them, and of his position in his social milieu’ (Mannheim, Reference Mannheim, Wirth and Shils1954: 51, 50).
Mannheim's ideas regarding collective thinking and ideology provided Laslett with a new perspective with which he could interpret political theories within historical contexts. At the time that the English translation of Ideology and Utopia was published, Mannheim was teaching at the London School of Economics, where Laslett (after having read the book) visited him in search of research guidance. Although Laslett was carrying on historical research at Cambridge, he was actively ‘in revolt against the traditional historification which prevailed at Cambridge’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett1979: 224). Laslett was unsatisfied with Ernest Barker's idealistic approach to intellectual history (Barker being one of Laslett's professors at Cambridge), and was therefore looking for another approach to history (Skodo, Reference Skodo2016: 96). Laslett found that guidance and methodology in Mannheim, whom he asked how the method of sociology of knowledge could be applied to his ongoing study of Robert Filmer (Laslett, Reference Laslett1979: 224). Indeed, Mannheim's idea of sociology was embodied in Laslett's works on Filmer and, subsequently, on John Locke (Dunn and Wrigley, Reference Dunn and Wrigley2005: 115).
Mannheim's impact can be observed not just in Laslett's activity as an intellectual historian but also in his positivist aspect (which Bevir (Reference Bevir and Klosko2011: 13) emphasizes) and in his research on social structures. Laslett accepted in his own way the two suggestions made by Mannheim to advance the sociology of knowledge in the preface to the English version of Ideology and Utopia. The first was ‘to refine the analysis of meaning in the sphere of thought’. Such a refinement would support the reasonable hope that ‘grossly undifferentiated terms and concepts will be supplanted by increasingly exact and detailed characterizations of the various thought-styles’ (Mannheim, Reference Mannheim, Wirth and Shils1954: 45). The second suggestion was a proposal to improve and sophisticate the methodology of social history. As I will discuss later, Laslett's works on historical sociology is related to Mannheim's second proposal.
Mannheim's first proposal, calling for the clarification of ambiguous terms and concepts, seems to have prompted Laslett to find the parallel between the sociology of knowledge and logical positivism. Although grappling with Ideology and Utopia, Laslett and his friends ‘who were dissatisfied with the reigning English attitude to history’ were reading the works of logical positivists, such as C. K. Ogden, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus), and Frederick Ayer (Laslett, Reference Laslett1979: 225). Thus, Laslett was familiar with, and possibly even favourable towards, the works of logical positivists. It would thus be misleading to infer from his later declaration of the death of political philosophy in Philosophy, Politics, and Society (PPS) that Laslett was against this new style of philosophy. The death of traditional political philosophy and its history should not have been deplorable for him.Footnote 7 Indeed, Laslett's intellectual disagreement with Barker's traditional approach was so great that Laslett sought advice from Mannheim even as a research student at Cambridge.
Logical positivism exerted a lasting influence on the study of the history of political thought. According to T. D. Weldon (a representative positivist who was engaged in political philosophy) a political philosopher was not a transcendental and self-reliant observer of eternal issues, but rather was a political practitioner who approved or disapproved of a particular political opinion in a specific context – an intellectual shift that Laslett inherited (Koikkalainen, Reference Koikkalainen2011: 317). It is with this Weldonian image of a political theorist in mind that Laslett began exploring Locke and Filmer, the latter of which resulted in the fellowship dissertation to Cambridge. However, Laslett failed to obtain a fellowship since his methodology was flatly rejected by his reviewers, Ernest Barker and David Ogg (Laslett, Reference Laslett1979: 224–225; see also Skodo, Reference Skodo2016: 149). Afterwards, he learned Japanese and worked at Bletchley Park in naval intelligence (Dunn and Wrigley, Reference Dunn and Wrigley2005: 110). This experience must have deepened his conviction for his methodology, which focused on the relationship between ideological preconditions and political conflicts: he later observed that Filmer's ‘historical arguments are exactly parallel to the arguments used by the Japanese to vindicate the Emperor's claim to divinity’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett1949: 30).
After World War II ended, Laslett resumed his research on Filmer. His first task was exploring Filmer's ideology in the historical and social contexts where his patriarchal ideology sounded convincing – a task that had not been undertaken fully by previous scholars. His intensive survey of Filmer's background led Laslett to conclude that ‘the case of Sir Robert Filmer could be made into a classic instance of determined thinking, of the man who projects into his philosophy the facts of his material environment’. In short, according to Laslett, Filmer made ‘the rule of domestic society into principles of political science’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett1948: 544).Footnote 8 After publishing two articles on Filmer and compiling a critical edition of Filmer's works at the end of the 1940s, then, in the 1950s, Laslett turned to studying Filmer's arch-enemy: John Locke. Laslett's decade-long devotion resulted in the memorable edition of Two Treatises of Government and its erudite introduction in 1960.
Laslett's works on Filmer and Locke have both parallels and key differences. Both studies successfully made detailed historical investigations within a broad framework of interpretation, describing their political ideas not simply as products of personal thinking but as examples of collective thinking. Nevertheless, the differences are also notable. Laslett treated Filmer's patriarchalism as reflection of collective thinking or mentalité that was unintelligible without referring to his contemporary social structure and his own social status. In contrast, when describing Locke's political thought, Laslett mainly focused on the political group led by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftsbury, rather than on Locke's background social structure. Locke's political ideology expressed in the Two Treatises was characterized by the collective thinking generated in this political group (Laslett, Reference Laslett1960: 35–36). Although Laslett's interpretation of Locke profoundly influenced subsequent intellectual historians, Laslett nonetheless seems to have subsequently reorganized his research project along the lines of his previous study on Filmer: exploration of social structures.
While explicating Filmer's and Locke's ideologies in the 1940s and 1950s, Laslett implemented Mannheim's second proposal: ‘to perfect the technique of reconstructing social history to such an extent that (…) one will be able to perceive the social structure as a whole, i.e. the web of interacting social forces from which have arisen the various modes of observing and thinking’ (Mannheim, Reference Mannheim, Wirth and Shils1954: 45). For Laslett, that technique was introducing the social science methodology into historical inquiry. Like social scientists, the new social historians were expected to make use of numbers, tables, and statistics rather than relying on ‘descriptive and intuitive methods’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett1975) – that is, for example, on Shakespeare's descriptions of his contemporary England. This new social history should, he declared, ‘satisfy the criteria of the social sciences’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett and Sills1968: 434; see also 436). In short, Laslett (Reference Laslett1965: 583) wrote: ‘The numerical study of society, over time; this is perhaps the best short description of our purpose’.
A scientific history of social structures is uniquely equipped to synthesize all the histories of social activities (Laslett, Reference Laslett1962a). Therefore, according to Laslett, a history of social activities, including social and political thinking, cannot be written properly without first referring to social structures. In a review of Hannah Arendt's On Revolution, Laslett (Reference Laslett1964a) bemoaned the absence of a thorough analysis of social structures in this work and declared that ‘the day has passed when even intellectual history can be written in this sort of vacuum’. Laslett (Reference Laslett1964b) reiterated this same opinion in a private letter to Arendt, where he wrote about the content of his forthcoming book The World We Have Lost: the book ‘is about pre-industrial social structure but has, I believe, implications not simply for the “classics” of Political Theory but the whole content of Political Philosophy’. Laslett's statement clearly shows how he had great hopes for the role of historical investigations of social structure.
Thus far, I have surveyed Laslett's socio-structural contextualism, focusing on the sociology of knowledge, positivism, and the social sciences.Footnote 9 These three were, as we have seen, the elements that Laslett seems to have found in Ideology and Utopia. Furthermore, I suggest that Laslett's activities as a historian and social scientist are well understood as having been an unfolding process in which he developed what he received as Mannheim's ideas. Indeed, Laslett (Reference Laslett1979: 226) concluded his essay on Mannheim by observing that ‘I am still surprised when I glance again at Mannheim's work (…) at what I reproduce as mine, believing it to be so, which yet in fact was his’. However, Mannheim's approach has sometimes been criticized as a variation of Marxism, that is, a theory based on social determinism – if not a rigid economic determinism (Longhurst, Reference Longhurst1989: 67–71). Rather than discussing at length whether such criticisms are fair, I focus instead on whether this was Skinner's view on Laslett's methodology. In the following sections, I would like to argue that, although Skinner scarcely mentioned Mannheim, he nonetheless detected a deterministic aspect of sociology of knowledge in Laslett, and thus his own work aimed at constructing a different, un-deterministic contextualism.
3. History and social science
At the heart of Laslett's vision as a historian lay a comprehensive scheme to construct a scientific approach to social history that would synthesize all other branches of history. In the ensuing sections, I will explore how Skinner responded to Laslett's ambition. First, in this section, I analyse Laslett's positivism, by which is meant an attitude that presupposes that one can rigidly separate facts and values, willing to use natural scientific models to explain facts. I then depict Skinner's attitude to Laslett's approach to constructing social history. To some extent, my task is somewhat conjectural because Laslett never vocalized exactly how strong his conviction of positivism was; furthermore, Skinner never directly referred to Laslett as a positivist. Therefore, I focus on W. G. Runciman's work as a frame of reference for comparing these two historians' view of positivism. Runciman provides an ideal framework for making this comparison because he was the co-editor with Laslett for the second, third, and fourth series of PPS (Skinner would be a co-editor for the fourth series). Just as significantly, Runciman himself wrote theoretical reflections on the social sciences. By using Runciman as the mediating term for comparison, the difference between Laslett and Skinner becomes clearer.
Runciman's position could be described as ‘soft positivism’. He advocated for a rigid positivism in the 1950s but, later, he qualified his earlier position. In the early 1960s, Runciman (Reference Runciman1989: 3) realized that ‘the social sciences were more questionably “scientific” than they had looked’. Runciman had indeed ceased believing in the applicability of the natural scientific method to the social sciences, unlike, say, the associates of the Vienna Circle, such as Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel. Runciman's modification had at least two consequences. First, he distinguished between the roles of ‘explanation’ in natural and social sciences. Although strong positivists argued that a successful explanation is synonymous with prediction (Douglas, Reference Douglas2009: 448), Runciman (Reference Runciman1969: 17) denied such a rigid model of ‘explanation’ in social sciences. Second, he emphasizes the limit of quantitative methods. He was willing to admit quantitative data as the indispensable tool of economists and demographers. ‘But equally’, Runciman (Reference Runciman1969: 5) continued, ‘there are a great variety of problems where quantitative methods would be quite out of place: a comparative assessment of the motives and character of Robespierre and Lenin will not be best attempted by equation’.
Nonetheless, Runciman is still a positivist. Although he acknowledged some key deficiencies in strong positivism, he did argue that once positivism's limitations were realized, its research method could be both appropriate and profitable. In other words, he defended positivism as a useful fiction: ‘The historian (and therefore the social scientist) can never be a thoroughgoing positivist; but he must, once he has realized this, still try to behave up to a point as though he were’ (Runciman, Reference Runciman1969: 11). Hence the intellectual milieu of the 1960s, when positivism came under concentrated attack, and when ‘Collingwood's philosophy of history was receiving more attention than at any time since his death’, was unacceptable to Runciman (Reference Runciman1989: 5). Instead of abandoning positivism completely, Runciman argued for creating a cooperative of political philosophers and political scientists.
When compared to Runciman, Laslett was a more straightforward positivist. Although Runciman underlined the limits of positivism, Laslett put an unequivocal faith in it. For example, Laslett (Reference Laslett and Sills1968: 438) found no significant difference between calculating the contribution of the railroad business to the USA's GNP in 1850 and calculating the influence of Christianity in Europe. The quantifiable data are, for him, the ideal tool for digging ‘objective knowledge about the past’ (Laslett, Reference Laslett2005: 283) out of the folded layers of human experience. The divergence of these two thinkers is even clearer regarding the question of what constitutes a successful explanation of history. Runciman found a discrepancy between social and natural scientific models of explanation. Laslett (Reference Laslett and Laslett1956b: 159) disagreed: the successful theory in social science and history, he argued, captures ‘what is meant by it in the common-sense language of natural scientists: one capable of accurate prediction’. Laslett's view of what constitutes a successful theory is comparable to Hempel's identification of explanation with prediction: ‘the logical structure of a scientific prediction is the same as that of a scientific explanation’ (Hempel, Reference Hempel1942: 38).
The prefaces to the second and third series of PPS (which Runciman and Laslett co-authored) expressed an affinity to ‘soft positivism’ and opposed ‘anti-positivism’ – a position which both editors were at least able to share. These prefaces gladly reported the recent revival of political philosophy and the emergence of a new intellectual climate in which political philosophers and social scientists willingly cooperated with each other (Laslett and Runciman, Reference Laslett, Runciman, Laslett and Runciman1962: viii; Laslett and Runciman, Reference Laslett, Runciman, Laslett and Runciman1967: 4–5; see also Koikkalainen, Reference Koikkalainen2005: 123). However, they were also anxious of another trend of the 1960s, hostility towards positivism, though they added the caveat that the trend should not be exaggerated because the ‘philosophers who have attempted to undermine the orthodox fact-value distinction have met with only limited success’. After all, Laslett and Runciman (Reference Laslett, Runciman, Laslett and Runciman1967: 3) wrote, ‘it has not yet had effect on the greater part of the work done under the heading of political science’. Thus, these remarks undoubtedly signalled that even Runciman, as well as Laslett, who advocated ‘hard positivism’, refused to abandon the methodology of positivism.
This very outlook, expressed in these prefaces, is what Skinner fully rejected in the 1970s. In ‘The Limits of Historical Explanation’, Skinner (Reference Skinner1966b) partly upheld, or at least pretended to uphold, Laslett's vision (Koikkalainen, Reference Koikkalainen2005: 186–187).Footnote 10 However, Skinner's preface to the fourth series of PPS (1972) displayed his fierce opposition to positivism, renouncing Laslett's attitude towards positivism in the prefaces to the second and third series of PPS.Footnote 11 Skinner's preface was exclusively a repudiation of positivism; indeed, he viewed positivism an abominable legacy of the 1950s. Therefore, he perfectly welcomed ‘the final release from the positivist framework imposed by the sociologists and philosophers of the Fifties’ (Laslett et al., Reference Laslett, Runciman, Skinner, Laslett, Runciman and Skinner1972: 3). Those supporting the positivist belief in the rigid separation of fact and value, Skinner observed, simply failed to recognize the ideological aspect of the claim of value neutrality itself. One year after the publication of the preface, he criticized Robert Dahl's theory of democracy, arguing that value-neutral research is impossible and that the term democracy itself is a ‘descriptive-evaluative term’ (like ‘brave’ or ‘reckless’). Skinner (Reference Skinner1973: 298–301) thus concluded that using the word ‘democracy’ as if it were neutral eo ipso produces a strong ideological message.
Skinner's harsh, stinging criticism may have surprised Laslett and Runciman, but he may have felt that he had finally said what he had been considering back in the 1960s. Intellectual culture in the early 1960s, he recollected, was dominated by the drive to create ‘a genuine science of politics’ and value-neutral ‘empirical theories’. Such ‘pressure of the culture’, he continued, led him to spend ‘far too much time in the early 1960s reading this stuff’ – although he soon found the approach unappealing (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002b: 37; see also Skinner, Reference Skinner1978a: 26). Although Skinner was describing the general mood in Cambridge specifically and in Britain more broadly, given Laslett's advocacy of positivism, one could naturally suppose that some of that ‘pressure of the culture’ originated from Laslett. Indeed, Skinner rejected the very idea of an ‘objective truth’ detached from any standpoint – something that Laslett (Reference Laslett and Mitchison1962c: 333) hoped to obtain through employing the scientific method in relation to history. Rather, Skinner was sympathetic to the concept of ‘paradigm’, as expounded by Thomas Kuhn (in natural science) and Ernst Gombrich (in art) (Muscolino, Reference Muscolino2012: 34–35).
Not only was Skinner's objection directed at positivism itself, but also at the scientification of history. Skinner's objection was recounted in his short review, ‘The Role of History’ (1974), which was a critical response to Keith Thomas's essay ‘The Tools and the Job’ (which was a kind of social history manifesto, published in 1966).Footnote 12 In this essay, Thomas declared forcefully that the previous hegemony of political history was finally ending, while social history, by drawing on the rapidly growing social sciences, was now leading the field. For instance, this new direction of the field of history was exemplified in Laslett's project, a construction of the history of social structures. ‘Mr. Peter Laslett is right’, Thomas wrote, ‘to stress the indispensability of this numerical study of society for the reconstruction of social structure and mental environment of the past’. Like Laslett, Thomas unequivocally advocated for employing the scientific techniques of quantification and verification; he also insisted that ambiguous concepts like ‘public opinion’ and ‘the climate of an age’ should be clarified by statistics. If this steady development of social history continues, Thomas claimed, then this field will be ‘a central one, around which all other branches of history are likely to be organized’, although, he admitted, this ‘dethronement of politics will encounter much resistance’ (Thomas, Reference Thomas1966: 276).
Skinner's essay, ‘The Role of History’, is the locus of resistance to this movement. No matter how innovative Skinner was in history of political theory, he ultimately belonged to the more conservative side when facing the challenge posed by scientific social history to the more traditional style of political history which mainly consists of narratives regarding high politics. Skinner summarized Thomas's argument in two points and disputed both. The first is about the contribution of social history to social science: Skinner broadly endorsed the significance of social history in itself because of its capacity to reveal, for example, ‘the distinctions and connections between pre-industrial societies and the modern industrialised world’ and to open the way for introducing ‘the methods and findings of sociology and social anthropology’ into historical studies. However, Skinner argued, it neither followed that social history should be considered the centre of historical studies nor that social history was the only field capable of contributing to the social sciences. Political and intellectual history also enriched social science by, for example, offering political scientists the historical information they needed about the social role of political ideologies. Hence, from Skinner's view, it is both parochial and imperialistic to insist on the centrality of social history on the grounds of its capacity of contributing to the social sciences (Skinner, Reference Skinner1974: 103).
Although it may seem that Skinner was willing to build closer ties between history and social science, one quickly concludes that this was not Skinner's main purpose when reading Skinner's criticism of Thomas's second point. From Skinner's point of view, Thomas erroneously presupposed that the true aim of studying history is reducible to its contribution to social sciences. Such a premise was thoroughly unacceptable to Skinner because, in Skinner's mind, history played a wider variety of roles than merely offering historical data to verify theories in social sciences. This was especially true regarding traditional political history. Skinner's reply was quite simple: it is hardly possible to understand the conduct of the USA, at present, without a full knowledge of the country's history. Even when history did not verify any hypothesis, it could be useful in helping people understand the present; this, Skinner argued, was still the central role of history. ‘It would be a real intellectual loss’, Skinner (Reference Skinner1974: 103) wrote, ‘if the current preoccupations of professional historians with the analysis of social structures were to lead them to abandon this role entirely to the pundits and political journalists’.
Although his criticisms were ostensibly levelled at Thomas, it is nonetheless reasonable to suppose that a Laslettian-type contextualism was another implicit target of Skinner's objections. Thomas's focus on social history's central role, coupled with his willingness to incorporate the social scientific method, was shared by Laslett. The topics Skinner mentioned in ‘The Role of History’ – a comparison of pre-industrial and post-industrial societies, a consideration of the cooperation among history, sociology, and social anthropology, and an analysis of social structures – are the very same topics that Laslett had emphasized. In addition, it is nearly impossible to assume that Skinner would be ignorant of Laslett's view of history. As such, it is reasonable to identify a tacit objection to Laslett behind Skinner's elaborate criticism of Thomas.
Skinner was, as we have seen, clearly distancing himself, especially after the 1970s, from Laslett's ambition to reconstruct history after the scientific model. Instead, Skinner (Reference Skinner1975: 209) observed ‘the general retreat from empiricism and positivism in recent analytical philosophy has had a markedly beneficial effect on current discussions about the theory of interpretation’ and defended traditional political history against the rise of social history. However, the question remains: Why was he sceptical of a scientific social history? In answering this question, one sees a connection of Skinner's objection to the Laslett's vision with his philosophical discussion about methodology – that is, his critique of contextualism in ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’. In the next section, I argue that, for Skinner, the Laslettian version of intellectual history is a form of ‘contextualism’, thus revealing a clear and strong discontinuity between Laslett and Skinner.
4. The range of contextualism
After publishing ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ (1969), Skinner was known as a formidable enemy to textualism and contextualism. Although he devoted more pages in the article to refuting textualism than contextualism, his examination of contextualism occupied a more significant place in his overall project because it constituted the discursive foundation upon which he built his own methodology and levelled his objection to textualism (Inuzuka, Reference Inuzuka2019: 8). Contextualists, according to Skinner, claimed that social contexts determine the meaning of a statement in a given text. Thus, accordingly, its meaning could be understood correctly if – and only if – the text is analysed in terms of the social contexts in which the text was produced (Skinner, Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1969]: 58–59).
Skinner argued that unless contextualism was successfully eradicated, the activity of intellectual historians would be meaningless. This was so, he argued, because, according to contextualism, the true meaning of human actions (including writing a text) is to be found somewhere other than at the textual and linguistic levels. The contextualists whom Skinner mentioned in ‘Meaning and Understanding’ were essentially Marxists (mainly C. B. Macpherson), although he also referred to Lewis Namier, whom I will address later (Skinner, Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1969]: 59). However, as Peter Winch (Reference Winch1958: 104) was aware, the theoretical framework of Freudian psychology and Vilfredo Pareto's ‘residues’ were also similar to contextualism, to use Skinner's term. In Skinner's view, they were essentially contextualists because they sought to identify the cause of action within human desire, while regarding an expressed idea merely as its derivative. Indeed, Skinner (Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1974]: 109) later implied that Freud and Pareto were the source of inspiration for Namier, as well as for behaviourism. Additionally, Ferdinand Braudel's concept of ‘total history’ was also a typical example of contextualism for Skinner. To cover such a variety of approaches, Skinner sometimes used such terms as ‘epiphenomenalism’ and ‘the epiphenomenal approach’ instead of ‘contextualism’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1974]: 109; Skinner, Reference Skinner2002b: 39).
Skinner identified the basis of contextualism as a natural scientific explanatory model (Stanton, Reference Stanton2011: 78). Contextualism ‘may be said to illustrate, but also gain strength from, the more general and increasingly accepted hypothesis that actions performed at will are to be accounted for by the ordinary processes of causal explanation’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1969]: 59). He thus argued against contextualism in an article in the fourth series of PPS, writing that explanation of social action is irreducible to a natural-scientific causal explanation (Skinner, Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1972]). As I have noted above, Skinner vehemently attacked positivism in the preface to the fourth series of PPS; thus, this criticism was actually a continuation of his argument in the preface. Skinner (Reference Skinner1997: 314) later reiterated this view, observing ‘it was undoubtedly an aspiration of classical Marxism to make use of historical materials to formulate predictive social laws’.Footnote 13
In the following discussion, I suggest that Skinner was likely inclined to interpret Laslett's view of social and intellectual history as a form of contextualism. I do not intend here to argue one way or another whether Laslett was indeed a contextualist because his work can be interpreted both ways. On the one hand, he ruthlessly castigated strictly Marxist interpretation and denied class struggles and therefore a social revolution in seventeenth-century England. Laslett even went so far as to insist on purging the concept of ‘modernity’ from English history (Rasuretto [Laslett], Reference Rasuretto [Laslett], Kawakita, Yamamoto and Sashi1986: vs Rasuretto [Laslett], Reference Rasuretto [Laslett], Sakata and Okuda1992: 125). However, at the same time, Laslett (Reference Laslett2005: 286) was fully conscious of Marxism's ‘explanatory power’. Unlike Skinner Laslett (Reference Laslett1964c: 150) also wrote a favourable review of Macpherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, praising it as ‘a very important, arresting and original book, written with a zest and a clarity which is reminiscent of Maynard Keynes’. Moreover, although he rejected Marx's class struggle thesis, his own explanation sometimes sounds reductionistic.Footnote 14 Indeed, it is exactly this point that made Cesare Cuttica unsatisfied with Laslett's works on Filmer (Cuttica, Reference Cuttica2012: 7). My own focus with regards to this topic is, therefore, exploring Skinner's understanding of Laslett's project; that is, exploring whether Laslett's social history crossed the threshold by which Skinner judged his methodology to be a form of contextualism.
To this end, Skinner's opposition to the Annales is a useful focal point in that it provides a clue for inferring his attitude towards the Laslettian socio-intellectual history, although his objection to the Annales has received far less attention than it deserves.Footnote 15 Although the Annales was a less conspicuous opponent in Skinner's works than Marxist contextualism, it was equally unacceptable to him. The Annales, in general, aimed at turning narrative history of political events into a social history that analyses social activity in its totality and willingly incorporates necessary, and varied, methods and techniques (Burke, Reference Burke2015: 2–3). Among its members was Fernand Braudel, who disseminated their campaign to liberate history from political history's domination. Indeed, when referring to the Annales, Skinner almost exclusively named Braudel as its representative. Braudel's vision of history, which turned a spotlight on the longue durée or ‘structure’, except for its scale, was similar to the Laslettian history of social structure. ‘The Cambridge Group’, as Guy Ortolano (Reference Ortolano2009: 152) writes, ‘was Britain's answer to the Annales’. Laslett held that social history was in a position to synthesize all historical branches with the help of the social sciences. Braudel (Reference Braudel1980: 69) expressed the same opinion: ‘history is a synthesizer, an orchestrator’ and ‘it finds itself regularly sharing the dish with sociology, which is also a synthesizer’.
Skinner bluntly disapproved of the Annales's vision. In his view, the Annales was a group of ‘structuralist’ historians. In particular, Braudel urged fellow historians to adopt ‘a far more sociological as well as deterministic perspective’ to explicate the deep geographical and social structure that underlay, and secretly dominated, political events (Skinner, Reference Skinner and Skinner1990: 18–19). However, the result of the Annales's ‘materialist approach’ was devastating for all intellectual historians. ‘With geography determining economics’, Skinner (Reference Skinner2002b: 38) said, ‘and with economics determining social and political life, there was little space left for the life of the mind except as an epiphenomenon’. It thus follows that Braudel's total history completely failed to capture the vastness of human activities, such as art, literature, and philosophy (Skinner, Reference Skinner2007a: 104). Thus, for Skinner, the Annales's discursive structure was essentially the same as that of Marxist, and its approach was just as repugnant as C. B. Macpherson's.
The traits of Skinner's criticism of the Annales become clearer when compared to Laslett's appraisal of it. Although Skinner responded with hostility towards the Annales and its alleged determinism, Laslett felt more of a rivalry with the group. Laslett considered that his Cambridge Group shared the idea of sociological history with the Annales, but seems to have believed that The Cambridge Group were superior to the Annales.Footnote 16 He was proud that it was the Annales that sought the cooperation of the Cambridge Group and not vice versa (Obelkevich, Reference Obelkevich2000: 147). It is therefore not surprising that his comment on the Annales took the form of offering a sort of advice: The Annales should avail itself of the social sciences more. According to Laslett's critique, Braudel, the don of the Annales, was unaware of demography's development; indeed, Laslett claimed that Braudel had failed to make full use of statistics, psychology, and sociology. Worse than that, Laslett disgruntledly wrote, Braudel had recently ‘complain[ed] that the social sciences are out to dehumanise history’, though Braudel himself had been pursuing this same course (Laslett, Reference Laslett1973). Thus, unlike Skinner, Laslett did not criticize Braudel's approach as deterministic; he complained, rather, a lack of exploration of de-humanistic elements.
Skinner strongly opposed all forms of determinism, and therefore he has been sensitive to deterministic elements in other historians. When Alan Macfarlane asked Skinner to comment on Hugh Trevor-Roper in an interview, Skinner (Reference Skinner2008: Part 2, 00:08:30–45) surprised him by responding that Trevor-Roper seemed a sort of Marxist in that he supposed that every society had its ‘fundamental bedrock’ and ‘everything else was just a Shibboleth’. Even Pocock was criticized according to this perspective (Tsutsumibayashi, Reference Tsutsumibayashi1999: 71); Skinner (Reference Skinner2007a: 107) saw Pocock as ‘a more structuralist historian’ than himself. He also found in Pocock a deterministic inclination similar to Braudel's. Skinner's demurral at Pocock in ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’ was evidently a paraphrase of his criticism of the Annales in ‘The Role of History’.Footnote 17 Skinner suspected that discourse and language themselves played the same deterministic role as that of geography and social structure in Pocock's methodology. Although Pocock ‘stresses the power of language to constrain our thoughts’, Skinner was inclined to stress ‘language as a weapon of debate’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002b: 49; Skinner, Reference Skinner2007a: 107).
Considering Skinner's perspective on both the Annales and contextualism, alongside his sensitivity to determinism, we have good reason to conclude that Skinner would have viewed Laslett as a contextualist. Because Skinner never failed to find contextualist aspects in other historians, it would be an odd oversight if he had not realized such aspects in Laslett. For Skinner, the contextualist approach to history degraded ideas as merely epiphenomena of other factors. In fact, he openly expressed such dissatisfaction with both Braudel and the Annales and, more cautiously, with Pocock as well. Given the parallel of the Laslettian and Braudelian approach to history, from Skinner's perspective, Laslett would lie somewhere between the Annales (and Marxists) and Pocock, being fairly closer to the former. Thus, the range of Skinner's definition of contextualism expanded to include Laslett and, therefore, as I will argue in the next section, his battle against contextualism was to construct an alternative to the Laslettian vision of history.
5. Overcoming contextualism
Skinner's rejection of contextualism was accompanied by an alternative: the history of ideology. Although Laslett attempted to incorporate the history of political ideas into a socio-structural history, Skinner chose political history as the partner of a history of political thought. This fact is significant because it strongly suggests that Skinner made a clear and final departure from the path opened up by Laslett, when Skinner established the history of ideology in theory as well as in practice. Therefore, his challenge to Namierism in 1970s was, as I will argue, not merely a transitional point to overcome contextualism but was also the last step in Skinner's rebuttal of the Laslettian project of socio-intellectual history by combining political history and the history of political thought.
From the outset, Skinner seems to have aimed at combining political history and the history of political thought. His first ambition was, Skinner (Reference Skinner2002b: 42) recollected, ‘doing for Hobbes what Laslett had done for Locke’. As the title of his early essay, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought’, makes clear, he put Hobbes in ‘the ideological context’ to elucidate what speech acts Hobbes had performed (Skinner, Reference Skinner1966a). What had already been implied in this approach came to be articulated as a methodology in his essay, ‘Some Problems’, in which Skinner (Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1974]: 99) wrote: ‘We can hardly claim to be concerned with history of political theory unless we are prepared to write it as real history – that is, as the record of an actual activity, and in particular as the history of ideologies’. Otherwise, history would be an accumulation of ‘myths’ rather than history in its proper sense.
In 1966, the same year that Skinner published ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought’, Skinner launched a revision of two conventional methodologies (i.e., textualism and contextualism) to justify the approach he employed in ‘The Ideological Context’. However, his first attempt to overcome contextualism ended in failure, the most important reason of which was that he had left the relation between contextualism and the natural scientific model of explanation ambiguous. ‘Historians of ideas’, Skinner (Reference Skinner1966b: 203) had noted, ‘are seldom found to ask what caused a poet or a philosopher or a composer to elaborate his most characteristic ideas’. However, as he would clarify three years later in ‘Meaning and Understanding’, contextualists did encourage fellow historians to identify the foundational causes of ideas in, for example, a social context. By identifying contextualism with the natural scientific model of explanation, Skinner thus refined his previous criticism against contextualism and suggested an alternative in ‘Meaning and Understanding’.
Against contextualism, Skinner defended non-causal explanations of an action of writing and expressing political ideas (Palonen, Reference Palonen2003: 45). In other words, there remains ‘meaning’ that cannot be properly explained in terms of natural scientific explanations (Skinner, Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1972]: 96). As Skinner (Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1969]: 61) argued, even if ‘the study of the social context of texts could serve to explain them, this would not amount to the same as providing the means to understand them’. Here, he employed the traditional dichotomy between explanation and understanding. Its classical expression is found in Wilhelm Dilthey's work: ‘We explain nature but we understand mental life’ (Dilthey, Reference Dilthey and Rickman1976: 89). Collingwood (Reference Collingwood and Knox1946: 213–217) concurred, distinguishing between an external, causal explanation and an internal understanding of an agent. Skinner refined this dichotomy by introducing J. L. Austin's speech act theory, which focused not on the utterance itself, but on the action performed in uttering. Adopting this idea, Skinner argued that understanding a text is understanding the author's speech act within linguistic contexts. Skinner would continue to revise and sophisticate his objection to contextualism after the 1970s.
As Skinner developed his objections, the shadow of Lewis Namier loomed as one of his most formidable opponents. Namier was a historian, whose works on eighteenth-century England dramatically revised the traditional view of Parliament in that century. Namier saw political ideas as merely an ex post facto rationalization of politicians' hidden emotions, implying that political ideas held no explanatory force of politicians' behaviour (Namier, Reference Namier1961: 147; see also Skinner, Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1974]: 109). Skinner found the same structure of the Marxist explanation in Namier, because, for Namier as well as Marxists, political ideas were mere epiphenomena. Although sometimes misrepresented, Namier never claimed that political ideas were completely irrelevant to political events; he was quite sensitive to the tragedy produced by ideologies or political ideas (Namier, Reference Namier1955: 7). Namier's hostility towards ideologies seems to have been underpinned by his belief that they only served to conceal the true motives of political leaders and, in particular, after he was confronted with the horrific atrocities of Nazi Germany. Hence, for Namier (Reference Namier1955: 7), the death of political philosophy was the best sign of a politically mature nation. What Namier actually insisted on was that, although political ideas could greatly influence the multitude's behaviour, it was naïve for historians to employ ideologies to explain political leaders' behaviour. Instead, historians must search for politicians' real motives – or ‘the underlying emotions’ (Namier, Reference Namier1955: 4; Brooke, Reference Brooke1964: 338–341).Footnote 18
Namier's contextualism required Skinner to construct a different kind of critique than he had before. Although the structure of Namier's argument was, for Skinner, the same as other contextualists, the difference lay in Skinner's own purpose. Because Skinner attempted to combine political history with the history of political thought, it was insufficient to invoke non-causal explanations to refute Namierism. Without moderating any substantive assumption, Namierite historians could completely accept Skinner's criticism against Marxist contextualism (i.e., non-causal explanations of political ideas). Namierite historians could ask, even after accepting Skinner's argument, what, then, political historians could explain by focusing on political ideas, if ideas did not cause political action. This very suspicion is what Skinner had to answer to, and he did so by sophisticating his theory of history of political ideology. In the 1970s, Skinner (Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1974]: 110) thus began buttressing his methodology, illuminating ‘a further type of causal connection’ between political ideas and action.
Responding to Namierite contextualism constituted not just Skinner's final repudiation of contextualism but also his last step in breaking away from Laslett's goal of incorporating the history of political thought into social history. Keith Thomas (Reference Thomas1966: 276) called the final volume of Oxford History of England the ‘swansong’ of political history, while the Annales dismissed political history as a history of events that overlooked deeper structure of human activities. Likewise, Laslett was convinced that his history of social structures marked a clear departure from the descriptive political narratives. Unlike these historians, however, Skinner never dispelled the concept of political history, but rather he attempted to link political thought to political history. To accomplish this task, he first had to convince Namierite historians to open the door for historians of political ideas. To put it another way, Skinner had to demonstrate why political historians could not legitimately ignore political ideas and why political history would be deficient if historians neglected the ideological dimension of political actions.
Skinner's repudiation itself needs little explication.Footnote 19 He underpinned his methodology with a recycled concept of ‘evaluative-descriptive terms’, an idea that he first articulated in his review of Dahl's democratic theory. This concept once used against positivist theory was reused here to refute the contextualist historical interpretation. Both political thinkers and political actors, Skinner claimed, manipulated ‘evaluative-descriptive terms’. He conceded to Namier that an agent could conceivably not believe his or her expressed principle at all. However, Skinner continued, once political agents used favourable terms, such as democracy or liberty, to legitimize their actions, then the same expressed ideas in turn restricted their actions to the extent that their expressed ideas sounded convincing to the audiences. As a consequence, although an agent's expressed ideas could be ex post facto rationalizations, it does not necessarily follow that the ideas are useless in explaining the actions of agents (Skinner, Reference Skinner and Tully1988 [1974]: 116–117; see also Goldie, Reference Goldie, Brett, Tully and Hamilton-Bleakley2006: 8). Like ‘the time-honoured puzzle about the chicken and the egg’, Skinner (Reference Skinner2007b: 129) thus declared, the question whether the ‘reality’ precedes ideas or vice versa was itself ‘a question mal posée’. It is simply impossible to translate the question whether political agents sincerely believed in their expressed ideas into another question whether political ideas had any influence on political actions.
Thus, Skinner capably objected to Namier, arguing that political thought played an indispensable role in explaining the activities of past political agents. His confidence in this approach was evident in the preface to The Foundations of Modern Political Thought:
The adoption of this approach might also help us to illuminate some of the connections between political theory and practice. It is often observed that political historians tend to assign a somewhat marginal role to political ideas and principles in seeking to explain political behaviour. And it is evident that, as long as historians of political theory continue to think of their main task as that of interpreting a canon of classic texts, it will remain difficult to establish any closer links between political theories and political life. But if they were instead to think of themselves essentially as students of ideologies, it might become possible to illustrate one crucial way in which the explanation of political behaviour depends upon the study of political ideas and principles, and cannot meaningfully be conducted without reference to them (Skinner, Reference Skinner1978b: xi–xii).
As this statement clearly presents, Skinner wrote his masterpiece with the methodological conviction that his own arguments had secured a place for political thought in political history.
Tracing the trajectory of Skinner's successive objection to contextualism from the 1960s to The Foundations, we can now assess the significance of The Foundations in terms of methodology. Commentators have often argued that The Foundations betrayed Skinner's methodological prescription, pointing to the alleged gap between Skinner's methodology and the narrative structure of The Foundations (e.g., Boucher, Reference Boucher1985: 242). However, as I have shown that, even if this accusation might be true regarding Skinner's textualism, no such gap is found between The Foundations and Skinner's criticism of contextualism. Furthermore, having considered the Laslettian history of social structure as a form of contextualism, we can now redescribe Skinner's criticism of contextualism as a process of successive steps leading to his final departure from Laslett. If The Foundations is a terminus of his challenge to contextualism – completed in a criticism of Namier – then it is possible to see The Foundations as Skinner's declaration of independence from Laslett's method.
6. Conclusion
In this paper, I have attempted to reveal Skinner's anti-Laslett moment. The intellectual movement that Laslett began making once he put Mannheim's sociology of knowledge into practice, and then incorporated the history of political ideas into a history of social structure, laid a methodological foundation that Skinner would eventually reject. Laslett's comprehensive vision of history led him to develop the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which Skinner claimed was ‘a wrong turning’. This remark was neither accidental nor inadvertent, but was indeed significant – that reason I have tried explaining throughout this paper. Through constructing his own methodology, Skinner thus indirectly repudiated both Laslett's positivism and his vision of history, while simultaneously combining the history of political thought with political history, rather than with social history as Laslett had attempted to do. Skinner's repudiation of contextualism culminated in The Foundations, and therefore for those who regard the work as a quintessential achievement of the Cambridge School, The Foundations would serve as a barometer for how far the Cambridge School veered from Laslett's vision.
If the narrative so far is convincing, it would be legitimate to argue that Skinner's early methodology was, in part, a rhetorical redescription of the term ‘ideology’. Ideology was a pivotal concept in Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. His sociological analysis of knowledge suggested that a particular political idea should be explicated as an ideology, that is, as an entity produced by the collective thinking of a group situated within a particular social structure and occupying a specific social status. By employing Mannheim's approach, Laslett explored past political theorists, especially Filmer's political idea. Laslett regarded Filmer's political ideas as reflections of the familial and social structures in which he lived. Although neither Manheim nor Laslett were rigorous determinists, their arguments nonetheless implied some deterministic elements, and Skinner seems to have focused his interpretation of their methodology on these specific deterministic aspects. When Skinner described his own vision of the history of political thought as that of ideology, he inherited Mannheim's, and partly Laslett's, terminology. However, in his work, Skinner radically removed the deterministic aspect of the term ‘ideology’; rather than being determined by something else, ideology was, Skinner declared in The Foundations, ‘one of the determinants of his [ = an agent's] action’ (Skinner, Reference Skinner1978b: xiii).
Moreover, the comparative analysis of Laslett and Skinner in this paper, focusing on the differences rather than theoretical continuity between them, elucidates their previously obscured contributions to the recurring debate between history and social science. For example, in 2015, a researcher of international politics, Hiroyuki Hoshiro, published How to Create Theory from History: Integrating Social Science and History, which deplores the lack of reciprocal communication of these two fields and articulates a mode of explanation that both disciplines could adopt (Hoshiro, Reference Hoshiro2015: 20). Hoshiro's work was met with an immediate response from historians, and while their replies were not necessarily harsh and their attitudes do not converge, one critic did express his anxiety that the suggested integration would simply result in the subordination of history to the social sciences (Jin'no et al., Reference Jin'no, Nishiyama and Hasegawa2016: 75; this part was written by Jin'no). Another critic noted that historians do not rely on any one specific social scientific method. Rather, historians ‘rely, perhaps, on a perception obtained through open-minded analysis of historical documents, a way which Yoshio Yasumaru once called “methodological un-methodology”’ (Jin'no et al., Reference Jin'no, Nishiyama and Hasegawa2016: 76; this part was written by Nishiyama). Nonetheless, both Hoshiro and all the critics did agree that further investigation on the connection between history and social sciences was indeed necessary.
If we contrast Skinner with Laslett, rather than with a Straussian or Marxist approach (as is often done), a significant contribution of Skinner's argument to such a discursive conflict becomes clear: ‘methodological un-methodology’ is not necessarily an alternative to social scientific explanation, but an investigation based on another type of methodology can be an alternative. Skinner's discussion of methodology, which argued against contextualism including a Laslettian-type social scientific history, would rightly remind many political scientists of Clifford Geertz's ‘thick description’. Indeed, Skinner sometimes referred favourably to Geertz (Skinner, Reference Skinner2002a: 47 (n87), 97, and 103 (n4)). However, this ‘thick description’ has provoked negative responses in some classical works on ‘explanation’ and research methods in the social sciences (e.g., Little, Reference Little1991: 142; King et al., Reference King, Keohane and Verba1994: 36–41 and 75 (n1)); it was even criticized for its sheer lack of ‘methodological awareness’ (Kume, Reference Kume2013: 221).Footnote 20 Nevertheless, the discussion in this paper makes clear that advocacy for non-causal explanation does not necessarily negate coherent explanation itself. Skinner attempted to position his methodology as a compelling counterapproach to the one widely employed in social sciences, of which Laslett was a vehement supporter.
However, ‘liberating’ Laslett from the status of founder of the Cambridge School – distinguishing between his and Skinner's approaches – makes Laslett's rich contributions even clearer than those of Skinner. Two twenty-first-century developments in the academic world would stimulate a revival of the Laslettian belief in fruitful cooperation between the history of ideas and the social sciencesFootnote 21: the development of the digital humanities and the turn towards global intellectual history. Laslett emphasized that the quantitative approach was indispensable for the historical investigations of social structure, claiming that without such investigations, as in the case of Arendt, even the history of political ideas would be defective. The development of the digital humanities, which is ‘redrawing the boundary lines among the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and the natural sciences’ (Burdick et al., Reference Burdick, Drucker, Lunenfeld, Presner and Jeffrey2012: 122), has made it possible to apply quantitative approaches to the history of ideas on an unprecedented scale. As a recent seminal work that employs the numerical method, ‘The Idea of Liberty, 1600–1800: A Distributional Concept Analysis’ carefully but explicitly identifies the Cambridge School as a methodological opponent (de Bolla et al., Reference de Bolla, Jones, Nulty, Recchia and Rega2020: 381–382); this new trend represents, as it were, a counterattack by the Laslettian vision. A Laslettian moment, which ‘the Cambridge School’ has obscured, is now unfolding virtually unnoticed and much more effectively than in 1960s when Skinner launched his methodology.
In addition to the development of the digital humanities, a global turn in historiography would require the return of the Laslettian vision. As Hoshiro noted, antagonism between social scientists and historians has long been common. However, although the development of global history has by no means prompted intellectual historians to abandon their research into smaller contexts, it has called on them to clarify the role of ideas, including their causality, on a global scale. Andrew Sartori (Reference Sartori, Whatmore and Young2016: 208) has called this outlook ‘intellectual history in global history’. Laslett's approach, which made ‘comparison’ an important methodological component, rather than Skinner's, helps us grasp the role of political ideas in such a large framework. Although Skinnerian intellectual historians would find it difficult to integrate their approach with a large-scale comparative historical analysis of, say, Acemoglu and Robinson, Laslettian intellectual historians would welcome such integration as a basis for their own investigations. Laslett's vision provides an answer to the demand for ‘intellectual history in global history’ and a methodological basis for incorporating comparative socio-historical analyses into the history of political thought.
Finally, despite their differences, it warrants emphasis that, as pointed out above, both Laslett and Skinner took seriously the relationship between the history of ideas and the social and political sciences, and discussed how intellectual historians should respond to the emerging social sciences. Although David Easton once complained that historians of political thought indulge in historicism and fail to examine important social values (Easton, Reference Easton1951), contemporary political scientists seem to have simply decided to ignore the history of political thought. In severely criticizing political philosophy for its lack of solid methodology, the eminent political scientist, Masaru Kohno, did not even touch on the historical approach (Kohno, Reference Kohno, Inoue and Tamura2014); indeed, the history of political thought itself tends to disappear in political science textbooks.Footnote 22 Nevertheless, historians of political ideas are also responsible for this disappearance: unlike Laslett and Skinner, they do not seem to seriously ask how and why they should (or should not) incorporate social and political science methods into intellectual history. This situation may indeed be a consequence of a peaceful compromise, an agreement to disagree. Such a feigned détente is, however, a legacy that neither Laslett nor Skinner has left us with – this fact is perhaps the most important lesson one can learn from them.
Acknowledgements
I appreciate the invaluable advice and comments provided by Aikawa Yusuke, Baji Tomohito, Hayashi Takafumi, Kamimura Tsuyoshi, Kawakami Yohei, Lee Dongsun, Nagano Akira, J. K. Numao, and Tabata Shinichi. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21K13230.
