Review Article Philosophy for Historians: The Methodological Writings of Quentin Skinner

BEN ROGERS University of Oxford

Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics. Edited by James Tully. Oxford: Polity Press. 1987. xii + 353pp. E29.50 (hardback). f12.50 (paperback).

Thr: reputations of social scientists and literary critics are often made or lost on the strength of a methodological argument. The case is altogether different with historians. They can rely on philosophers of history to worry themselves over the epistemological status of truth claims about the past or over the cogency of subsuming historical actions under causal laws and other obscure conceptual puzzles. Writing history is about ascertaining and accounting for what humans did in the past and common sense is a good enough guide to this. Or is it? Quentin Skinner, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge and author of the acclaimed Foundations of Modern Political I’hought, as well as some seminal articles on Hobbes, is a practising historian of ideas who believes that historians can no longer remain wilfully ignorant about the theoretical issues that animate their colleagues in philosophy, social science and literature. His philosophical stance is, he claims, exemplified in his own historical writings, hut he has also ghen it a more explicit formulation in a series of me:hodological essays, written from the rid-sixties to the present, five of which are collected togetlier in the present volume.

Admittedly, historiana t)f idcas tend to be, of all historians, the most reflexive. They are inclined from the very naturc of their discipline to have a particularly philosophicdl cast of tnind; but in addition they are especially vulnerable to thc one charge that does rouse historians from their methodological oblivion, the charge that the type of history in which they specialize has become superfluous and should be superseded by a more sociologically realistic approach. In this instance the challenge comes from a broad front of social, political and economic histonans who accuse historians of ideas of operating on the naive premise that the canonical texts from Plato’s Republic to Mill’s On Liberty are contributing to a single debate on issues of universal significance. whereas in fact, when placed in their historical context, the ‘great’ texts prove really to be articulations (often oblique) of local

PHILOSOPHY FOR HISTORIANS 263

(often material) interests. Faced with this threat to their academic preserve, scholars of the Great Books respond that the search for motive is reductionist and that some texts do have a meaning which transcends the context in which they were written, a meaning which can be revealed by studying the text as a self-sufficient object of inquiry.

Professor Skinner’s own position - and he is keen to stress his debt to a group of like-minded scholars, Peter Laslett , John Dunn and John Pocock, in its evolution - has been developed in conscious opposition to the prevailing textualist and contextualist orthodoxies of the day. It is, indeed, the merit of his analysis that it suggests an alternative to either which does justice to the insights of both.

Most of Skmner’s arguments are directed towards the assumptions under- lying the textualist approach, and the faulty historical practice to which its adoption gives rise. Textualists believe that they have a licence to ignore context because they think it invariable and thus transparent; they suppose that thinkers from all epochs uniformly address themselves to something like The Central Problems of Western Philosophy. On this view, the historian’s business becomes that of identifying the range of answers that have been given to the canonical questions. But, Skinner claims, the assumption of a transparent context is completely false. There are no perennial questions and any approach which supposes that there are will inevitably entail ‘the application of in- appropriate contemporary paradigms to the past’. Textualists are, in fact, led by this erroneous supposition to commit the first sin of their art: they set out upon historical inquiry with preconceived notions of the secrets that their research will reveal.

In the earliest essay reprinted here, which began life entitled ‘The Unimportance of the Great Texts in the History of Political Thought’, Skinner catalogues the historical errors and absurdities that arise from the adoption of this method. (This essay is, incidentally, something of a polemical four deforcc; it runs to 205 footnotes, most of which refer to books that come under Skinner’s fire.) A favourite textualist strategy is to attribute to a given thinker a doctrine he never in fact held, or even could never have held, on the basis that it corresponds to one of the doctrines in the Canon. In this way all philosophers are cast into a single mould: Socrates, like Rousseau, is assumed to have been concerned with ‘the problem of political obligation’. A variant of this strategy when, embarrassingly enough, any attempt to extrapolate something even remotely like a ‘position’ on one of the ‘timeless problems’ fails, is to criticize the thinker for his failure to address the issue. Accordingly, Locke is censured for not having thought about the very unseventeenth-century-like ideal of a world state.

Another particularly pernicious consequence of the application of anachronistic paradigms is the creation of a historiography devoted to iden- tifying anticipation of one of the Major Doctrines. In accordance with this approach, thinkers are commended for their prescient development of themes which they could have never recognized as their own - Machavelli is praised for being ‘the first master of political sociology’, thereby winning an accolade usually reserved for Montesquieu - while the real content of their thought

264 REVIEW ARTICLE

is ignored. Finally the view that the canonical texts represent systematic responses to universal questions gives rise to the refusal to countenance the possibility that a text might not be completely coherent or might be inconsis- tent with others by the same author; Marx, it is argued against all the evidence, never departed from his early humanistic outlook despite the apparent mechanistic approach of his mature writings.

Against this mythology of the great texts, Skinner pits a historicist con- ception - informed by Collingwood - according to which the history of ideas is conceived as ‘a sequence of episodes in which the questions as well as the answers have frequently changed’. Intellectuals work within shared but historically variable frameworks of concepts which inescapably set their philosophical and political agenda. If the purpose of studying philosophical, political and even literary texts is the retrieval of their historical identity, then the historian must recognize that any text is bound to represent an individual response to a culturally specific constellation of issues. In essence, it is Skinner’s contention that historians should appreciate that the classical authors, just like their less prominent contemporaries, were engaged in local (but not parochial) intellectual battles and that their weaponry was forged from a limited and conventional vocabulary. Much of Skinner’s own historical work is, significantly, couched in military metaphors.

In developing this argument Skinner has been able to avail himself of a picture of language sketched in the later work of Wittgenstein. On this conception, the language of any single community does not serve simply to provide a common means of referring to things its members apprehend independently; rather it shapes and even constitutes their experience itself. The linguistic and conceptual conventions of a historical community actually furnish criteria in virtue of which judgements are either valid or invalid; they provide it with its standards of reason and morality and its sense of the prob- lematic and the coherent. The key, then, to understanding any linguistic community is not to search outside it, for the objective issues it must, a priori, be addressing, but to get inside what Wittgenstein called its ‘language games’. Skinner maintains that the context in which intellectuals work is provided by philosophical language games of just this type; language games which ‘cause a certain range of issues to appear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate’. With a nod to Thomas Kuhn he sometimes calls these ‘paradigms’, or else ‘traditions’, ‘dis- courses’, ‘vocabularies’, ‘languages’ and ‘conventions’. His own Foundations deals with a range of these conventions: Humanism, Calvinism, Lutherism, Thornism are examples drawn from the sixteenth century.

However, the linguistic philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s does not just supply Skinner with the general philosophical orientation of his approach. He contends that the orthodox textualist position (and the contextualist one also) has been vitiated by a cluster of conceptual muddles about the relations between motive, intention, action and meaning, and he proposes to sort out these confusions by utilizing the theory of ’speech acts’ developed by Wittgenstein’s colleague, the ordinary language philosopher, John Austin.

Austin’s achievement was to focus attention on a prominent but hitherto

PHILOSOPHY FOR HISTORIANS 265

ignored dimension of language. He argued that philosophers had tended to treat all meaningful utterances as if they were statements and statements only, containing a sense and a reference and nothing more. But in fact language serves not only to describe and to designate; it is employed for a multiplicity of purposes from seducing to marrying and from betting to judging. Words - as the title of one of Austin’s books has it - are used to do things with. In short Austin argued, with a terminology of his own devising, that apart from its propositional or bcutionury meaning any serious utterance also has a point or an illocurionary force. Speech is action, 2s will be plain to any one who has reflected on the myriad ends to which language is put.

By bringing to light this pragmatic or illocutionary dimension of language, the fact that we not only make statements to others, but that in doing so, we warn them, console them, and so forth, Austin succeeded in showing that the traditional account of what was involved in understanding an utterance was incomplete. It is not sufficient simply to comprehend the meaning of the utterance; its character as an action, its illocutionary force, has to be iden- tified. Understanding the character of an action - its force - in turn involves identifying the agent’s intentions in undertaking it. The traditional account was thus blind to this simple fact: one can only be said to have fully understood an utterance when one has grasped not just its meaning, but the agent’s intentions in uttering it. Instances of satire and irony bring this fact into relief; only the correct identification of Jane Austen’s intentions in the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice and nothing in the meaning of the terms of the sentence themselves, will enable the reader to ascertain which of two opposing meanings, the ironic or the sincere, is the author’s own.

The theory of speech acts offers an account of what is involved in under- standing an utterance, including those objectified in texts. This is its relevance for Skinner. Reading a text over and over again might generate an accurate enough interpretation of its meaning, but an essential dimension of its historical identity would nevertheless have been overlooked. The historian would remain in the dark about the author’s intentions in writing the text or, the same thing, the use to which the author was putting his or her argument. In fact, with the resources of Austin’s analysis at his disposal, Skinner is able to reformu- late his position. His objection, as it turns out, is to any historian who ignores the illocutionary or performative aspect of the text. This includes textualists but also those who engage in contextualist research only with the aim of establishing the historical sense and reference of the textual utterances.

The point can be clarified with an illustration. Suppose a critic of Hume’s thought alights upon his portrait of Walpole in the essay ‘A Character of Sir Robert Walpole’. A close reading of the text, perhaps supplemented by a contextual verification of the meaning of its words, might render the meaning wholly transparent, which is to say the critic might understand all the qualities Hume ascribes to Walpole. The crucial question of what Hume was doing in writing and publishing this text nevertheless remains. Did it constitute a dangerous act of opposition, or was it simply affirming an orthodox Whig view? No rendering of the locutionary meaning of Hume’s essay, no matter how incisive, can reveal anything on this score. The requisite procedure,

266 REVIEW ARTICLE

rather, is to examine the conventions which governed writings about politics at that time. Such an examination would in fact reveal that the character of Walpole was a crucial point of contention in the battle of words between Court and Country parties, with journals like the Crafsman execrating Walpole, while Walpole’s own journals, not surprisingly, were replete with panegyrics to the ‘prime minister’. Hume’s essay thus represented a characteristic call for moderation in the conduct of English politics.

Hume’s intervention in the argument over Walpole is not, perhaps, of devastating import for the history of ideas; but it does nicely illustrate the sort of linguistic action that Skinner maintains all intellectuals, including the greatest, will be involved in. They will be taking a stand on the philosophical and political conventions of their day, or, in other words, they will be endeavouring to endorse, repudiate, amend and transform the discourses in which they find themselves placed.

Shnner’s reputation as a historian of ideas is founded upon his skill at un- covering the performative character of certain texts of a stature far greater than Hume’s short essay. Characteristically, he has focused on two thinkers who, of all others, have most often been acclaimed for their originality. For, in the case of both Machiavelli and Hobbes, critics have tended to argue that the apparently unprecedented nature of their arguments entails that there is little point in studying the context from which they arose. Nevertheless, even in the case of these two thinkers, Skinner has been able to show that each of their principal works, far from being sui generis, belonged to a distinct and local class of texts.

Thus in some of his earliest essays Skinner established that Hobbes’s Leviurhan, published in 165 1, which defended the authority of defucro govern- ment, was, in part, a contribution to the controversy over the legitimacy of the newly formed English Commonwealth, and this discovery, in turn, enabled Shnner to refute some of the most popular textualist interpretations of Hobbes’s argument. Similarly, in his study of Machiavelli, Skinner argued that both The Prince and the Discourses belong to established Humanist genres concerned with the conduct of princes and the conditions of republican rule respectively, genres which Machiavelli set out to transform. So, in the case of both Machiavelli and Hobbes, Skinner’s contextual research has enabled him to ascertain some of the positions these thinkers were adopting to the issues and conventions of their day. He has, in short, been able to identify the performative or illocutionary dimension of these texts, that dimension usually obscured by those textualist critics who insist on treating the classical works as if they addressed a problematic that existed outside history.

However, despite Skinner’s low opinion of the sort of historiography that results from an exclusive focus on the writings of the World Class thinkers, he will not be assimilated to the contextualist camp and he reserves some of his bromides for those critics - he has in mind here Namierites, behaviourists and a certain variety of Marxists - who behave as if the analysis of texts can be bypassed, with the end of identifying the hidden motives and interests from which they arose. Once again Skinner avails himself of Austin’s account of speech acts to expose the ‘fundamental mistake’ upon which this reductionist strategy rests.

PHILOSOPHY FOR HISTORIANS 267

Skinner’s quarrel with contextualism, or at least certain ‘materialist’ variants of it, rests on the claim that it ignores the contribution that the identification of illocutionary force makes not only to the understanding of a speech act but to its explanation. Contextualism rests, in short, on a faulty logic of the explanation of human action: in its concern to uncover the motives that caused any action, it fails to recognize that there are some cases - those in which an enquirer is puzzled not by the motives of an agent but by the character of her action - in which establishing the conventional, illocutionary force of an action serves a real explanatory purpose. More colloquially, Skinner contends that where an utterance is not properly understood, a helpful explanation might be provided, not by uncovering the secret motives from which it arose, but simply by identifying its ostensible point or, the same thing, by redescribing the action so as to make it clear how the agent intended the utterance to be understood. Skinner’s complaint against contextualism is thus an extension of his criticism of textualism: both disregard the illocu- tionary dimension of linguistic action, the latter by focusing exclusively on the locutionary meaning of its terms, the former by concentrating on its causal antecedents.

In claiming that in at least some cases explaining an act amounts to identi- fying the agent’s ostensible purposes in undertaking it, Skinner is entering into a familiar philosophical debate between a non-naturalist and a naturalist conception of action. However, as he explains in his third essay reprinted here, ‘ “Social Meaning” and the Explanation of Socia! Action’, Skinner’s position cuts across the standard causal-teleological dichotomy. He does not deny the conceptual coherence of searching for antecedent causes to (linguistic) actions in the form of motives that bear only a contingent relation to the meaning of the action. He simply maintains that there is a stage prior to that of identifying causes, a stage at which it is appropriate to try and understand the way in u h c h the agent intended his speech act to be understood regardless of his motives for having that intention.

The existence of this extra stage of explanation is likely to be obscured when the point of most of our day-to-day actions is self-evident. But, turning to the use of this analysis to the history of ideas, Skinner maintains that the force of historical texts is often far from clear and that it will be an essential task of the historian who sets out to understand and explain the historical significance of a text to ‘decode’ its (ostensible) point. Thus the interpretive approach Skinner advocates, that of situating each text in the intellectual matrix from which it arose, and thereby identifying the author’s attitude to the political and philosophical conventions of the day, promises not just an understanding of the meaning of the text but also at least a preliminary stage in its explanation.

Once again this principle can be illustrated by reference to Hume’s essay on Walpolc. For in uncovering the nature of contemporary arguments about Walpole’s personality and thereby identifying precisely the performative character - the argument - of Hume’s own text, the historian of ideas is able to give what is surely a genuine, if only preliminary, ‘explanation’ of what Hume was doing or at least professed to be doing, namely, admonishing the English for the immoderate manner in which they conducted their politics.

268 REVIEW ARTICLE

In arguing in this way, that there is a genuine explanatory purpose in studying intellectual traditions and interpreting individual thinkers in a context supplied by them, Skinner is not affirming the anti-materialist thesis that ideas are independent of the sphere of economic and political interest. On the contrary his argument is that unravelling precisely how thinkers were adapting prevailing intellectual conventions to their own purposes will be a necessary stage in any historiography that can establish the actual links between the world of ideology and the world of social action. His complaint against materialists is not that they are usually mistaken in their assumption that ideas are adopted for their instrumental value, but that they are in error in concluding from this that the historian may bypass the ideas because they in no way explain the behaviour of historical agents.

In fact Skinner is eager to commend the realism of the materialist approach, which is congruent with his own Wittgensteinian conception of language as a tool. By his own account some of the most significant innovations in intellectual history have come about as the result of ideologists seeking to manipulate traditional normative vocabularies, in order not only to describe but to legitimate ethically unacceptable courses of action. Skinner cites the way in which English entrepreneurs at the beginning of the seventeenth century stretched the conventions of Protestant Christianity - the language of ‘providence’, ‘devotion’ and ‘service’ - in order to justify their morally suspect commercial enterprises. (The ideological mutation of language in this way is the major theme of the Foundations, but in the fifth essay printed in the present volume, Skinner provides an abstract taxonomy of the different ways in which meanings can be manipulated, from the alteration of their sense or reference to the creation of neologisms.)

However - and this is the brunt of Skinner’s objection to materialists - just as intellectual conventions can provide a resource, they also act as a con- straint. Language can be manipulated but never replaced in one fell swoop, and therefore the innovating ideologist finds himself obliged not only to cut his language to fit his actions, but to trim his actions to suit his language. It follows not only that the ideologist’s material interests explain his ideology, in the way materialists suggest, but also, contrary to what materialists suppose, reference to his ideology will figure in any adequate explanation of his action. To continue with the last example, by manipulating the traditional language of Protestantism the English merchants not only legitimized their involve- ment in activities formerly considered immoral; they also constrained themselves to frugal patterns of consumption and to the practice of a tradi- tional Christian charity. In this way a focus on intellectual languages or ideologies, rather than on ‘The Great Books’, promises, according to Shnner, not just a better understanding of the classic texts themselves, but also a profounder awareness of the way in which ideas have shaped political and economic behaviour .

As well as the five original articles by Skinner and a long afterword in the form of ‘A Reply to my Critics’, the volume under review contains eight essays by his critics, James Tully’s introduction being the only one that is entirely friendly. The aspect of Skinner’s methodology which provokes the

PHILOSOPHY FOR HISTORIANS 269

strongest disagreement is the emphasis it places on retrieving the author’s intentions in writing the text. ‘It is neither necessary nor desirable’, Joseph Femia argues in his contribution, ‘to understand a body of thought purely or even primarily in terms of the author’s conscious designs.’ Any methodological naif unfortunate enough to follow Skinner in his ‘quasi- religious fixation on intentions’ (Femia) would be condemned to produce a ‘flaccid and uncritical’ historiography (John Kean) of only antiquarian interest, devoid of relevance to today’s intellectual concerns.

The intentional approach renders intellectual history ‘gratuitously barren’ (Femia once again); it is blind to the potentialities - the unintended meanings - inherent in any text; it arbitrarily precludes studying the text with any end in view other than that of ‘decoding’ its author’s intentions; and it implausibly supposes that a historian could retrieve the author’s hidden intentions, even in the cases where this is a desirable goal. These are the objections levelled against Skinner. And it is a testimony not only to the relevance of contem- porary analytic philosophy for these sort of methodological issues, but to the particular felicity of Skinner’s own critique, that his vindication of his position is far more incisive, and indeed compelling, than the presentation of these objections by his less analytically orientated critics (Femia and Kean in particular).

In reverse order, the last charge - that Skinner presents the historian with a hopeless task of identifying secret authorial intentions - disregards the distinction between motives, often secret, and intentions, which are in the case of speech acts always public (public at least for the audience to whom they are directed). The penultimate objection - that Skinner’s methodology precludes critics from reading texts in anything but a strictly historical fashion - misses its target. This methodology was, as a matter of fact, only directed to critics intent on retrieving the historical identity of texts; but that does not mean that it prohibits textual readings for other, non-historical, purposes. The next complaint - that a text might have a meaning unintended by its author - ignores the distinction between illocutionary and locutionary meaning. Skinner, following Austin, claims only that the former derives from authorial intentions; the latter, in the case of a complex text, is open to any number of interpretations never foreseen by the author.

As to the first objection - that Skinner’s precepts can only encourage a sterile, antiquarian approach to intellectual history - this would threaten to go to the very heart of his enterprise, were it not for the fact that, from his earliest writings, Skinner has been at pains to argue that his approach not only provides the basis for the writing of a genuine history rather than a series of ‘mythologies’, but that such a history could be of profound philosophical significance. Skinner bases his claim for the relevance of his methodological procedure on the sort of ‘anthropological’ conception of the history of ideas made popular by Isaiah Berlin.

Thus Skinner, following Berlin, argues that just like our ancestors of earlier epochs we are constrained in our moral and political beliefs by the concepts and categories which characterize our age. One way, perhaps the only really effective way, of loosening the grip these conceptual paradigms have on us

270 REVIEW ARTICLE

is by familiarizing ourselves with historical systems of thought very different from our own. Seeing ourselves in this way as ‘one tribe among others’ can only make us less prone to mistake our contingent and historically specific ethical convictions as timeless and immutable. In view of this, the dichotomy between the study of the history of philosophy and philosophy itself is a false one. A genuine historical knowledge will, it is true, undermine the notion that the great thinkers can provide relevant answers to problems peculiar to our own time, but it does give us the resources to broaden our conceptual horizons and view our own lives in a more searching and self-critical way.

However, notwithstanding Skinner’s claims for the relevance of his approach, his endeavour to establish the conceptual underpinnings of a genuinely critical history is marred in one respect: he appears never to have confronted the difficulty posed by the fact that texts can have unrecognized illocutionary meanings, meanings which their authors intend but do not acknowledge to themselves. As Kean correctly notes, in Shnner’s methodological writings and equally in his historical studies, ’political argu- ment is presumed to be a fully transparent play of self-conscious intentionality. ’ The difficulty I am referring to here is not that a thinker might have motives which he or she does not recognize, nor that a text might serve a function, at the time of writing or later, that its author did not intend. Skinner’s position can not only countenance these, but it furnishes the conceptual resources to differentiate them from the difficulty that is in question, namely that authorial intentions are often unrecognized, even by their author, and therefore that a text can have a force which its author never consciously conceived.

The essential idea, here, is quite commonplace: one might not fully describe, or might actually misdescribe one’s purpose in undertaking an action. With regard to the history of ideas, this is just the claim that the thinkers of any epoch are bound to give expression to norms that remain unarticulated and unacknowledged and that the historian is sometimes in a position to redescribe the point of certain speech acts, identifying intentions which the agent could have recognized, but did not. Charles Taylor, for instance, has argued that those modern philosophers who subscribe to the tenets of ‘naturalism’ tend to misdescribe their (linguistic) actions so that when they understand themselves to be arguing for one of the constituent positions of naturalism - an anti-realist meta-ethics, a materialist conception of the mind, or an individualistic natural law theory - they are also, in arguing for these, a f f i n g a mute but deep-rooted commitment to an ideal of heroic disenchantment. A similar sort of redescriptive enterprise underlies the work of a number of other recent and contemporary historians, notably Foucault, and whatever the plausibility of these histories, this search for a hidden Weltanschauung does not seem conceptually incoherent. If Skinner wishes to fulfil his goal of forging the methodological tools with which to write a genuinely criticul history of ideas, he needs to think more about this conceptually problematic relation between unrecognized norms and individual intentions.

Even if one is persuaded of the value of Skinner’s essays in providing a trenchant theoretical elucidation of the intellectual historian’s task, there still remains the question of the relevance of these methodological debates for

PHILOSOPHY FOR HISTORIANS 271

the practising historian. It is pertinent in this respect that Skinner has been obliged to qualify his own position over the course of time. His earlier essays were written in a spirit of ‘enthusiasm’ (his own word) and it has since become evident, even to Slunner himself, that he initially claimed too much for the powers of his philosophy. It seemed, originally, as if he wanted to deny the existence of any long-standing intellectual traditions, and indeed the stress he laid on the individuality of each text apparently threatened the whole project of searching for intertextual resemblance. Furthermore he seemed, at moments, to wish to deny that a study which focuses mainly on the text could, in any circumstances, be fruitful. Skinner has since been obliged to modify these claims in the direction of common sense. But with the move to common sense there is some risk of Skinner’s hard-won methodological precepts becoming . . . well. . . common-sensical. Empirically minded historians might not thus find their original scepticism dispelled.