Ideas, History and Social Sciences

An Interview with Quentin Skinner

in Theoria
Author:
Jérémie Barthas
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Part of a collective project for promoting the study of the history of political ideas within the field of the social sciences in French academia, this interview focuses on method, and more specifically on Prof. Quentin Skinner's relationship to the social sciences (from Max Weber to Peter Winch and Pierre Bourdieu). Questions were sent in French, via email, to Quentin Skinner, who answered them in English. The answers were then translated into French and the interview was published in Vers une histoire sociale des idées politiques, ed. Chloé Gaboriaux and Arnault Skornicki (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2017). For editorial reasons, one question and response, regarding method in the Italian tradition of the history of ideas, had to be omitted; it is reintroduced here. The questions have been translated for Theoria by Victor Lu. Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor in the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought (London); Arnault Skornicki is Senior Lecturer at Paris Nanterre University (Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique); and Jérémie Barthas is Researcher at the CNRS (Institut d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine).

Part of a collective project for promoting the study of the history of political ideas within the field of the social sciences in French academia, this interview focuses on method, and more specifically on Prof. Quentin Skinner's relationship to the social sciences (from Max Weber to Peter Winch and Pierre Bourdieu). Questions were sent in French, via email, to Quentin Skinner, who answered them in English. The answers were then translated into French and the interview was published in Vers une histoire sociale des idées politiques, ed. Chloé Gaboriaux and Arnault Skornicki (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2017). For editorial reasons, one question and response, regarding method in the Italian tradition of the history of ideas, had to be omitted; it is reintroduced here. The questions have been translated for Theoria by Victor Lu. Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor in the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought (London); Arnault Skornicki is Senior Lecturer at Paris Nanterre University (Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique); and Jérémie Barthas is Researcher at the CNRS (Institut d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine).

Jérémie Barthas (JB): During a conversation we had at the British Library in the summer of 2014, you mentioned the particularly warm welcome Pierre Bourdieu gave you when he invited you to deliver a series of lectures at the Collège de France in Paris. That was in the spring of 1997. At that time, only your short introduction to Machiavelli had been translated into French (in 1989) and your work was still relatively unknown in France. For example, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, which definitively established your international reputation, appeared in Paris only twenty-three years after its original publication, in 1978. A gap of a generation!

In the last sessions of the two-year course at the Collège de France, ‘On the State’ (1990–1991), Bourdieu had certainly referred to Foundations, but the penetration of your work in France really began with your 1997 lectures. Slow at first, it has become quite spectacular in recent years. The translation of your three collections Visions of Politics (2002) is now eagerly awaited.1 This late recognition, which is not without parallels to that of Edward P. Thompson, among others, could be treated as a symptom: why, after having kept its distance from British historiography for so long, is the French academic world now turning to it? My colleague Arnault Skornicki and I would like to start this interview by asking your view of a phenomenon that affects you directly and yet, as it were, from afar?

Quentin Skinner (QS): You speak of how the French academic world has only recently ceased to maintain its distance from British historiography. But I must say that in my own case France was the first country in continental Europe to offer me a warm welcome and make me feel that my research might be of interest. You are right to say that I received a particularly generous reception from Pierre Bourdieu in 1997, but he was by no means the first academic to invite me to Paris. I had already visited in 1991 when Armand Himy asked me to give a series of seminars at Paris X, and my first academic visit had been in 1987 when François Furet asked me to deliver a ‘cours’ at the Institute Raymond Aron. François's invitation enabled me to spend an immensely enjoyable couple of months in Paris and thereafter I maintained a number of links with the École des Hautes Études, giving lectures and serving on PhD juries there, as well as acting from 1992 to 2008 as a member of the jury for the Prix Guizot. It was also at the École that I enjoyed one of the most exciting days of my entire academic life. This was when I was invited in 2001 by the then-President, Jacques Revel, to give the Marc Bloch Lectures, which I delivered in the Grand Amphithéâtre of the Sorbonne to the largest audience I think I have ever addressed.

There is no doubt, however, that my time at the Collège de France in 1997 was for many reasons particularly memorable. The channel tunnel had recently been opened and Paris had suddenly become wonderfully accessible. By then I had made many friends in Paris, who were extremely hospitable. I felt deeply honoured by Bourdieu's invitation to lecture at the Collège and I was also greatly touched by his personal kindness. After my lectures he used to carry me off to dinner at the Brasserie Le Balzar, where he was received like a prince, and afterwards we took some highly enjoyable walks through the Quartier Latin. He also took me to a splendid lunch organised by the Éditions du Seuil in rue Jacob, an occasion that for me had very important consequences. Bourdieu not only persuaded Seuil to publish my ‘cours’, which appeared as La liberté avant le libéralisme in 2000, he also asked me to revise some articles I had published about Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his cycle of Buon governo frescoes. Bourdieu's idea was that my articles might be reworked and published as a book in French. He was sufficiently interested in my attempt to talk about the political functions of art that he arranged for my book to appear in the series he edited for the Raisons d'agir imprint, and he also agreed to supply an introduction. Very sadly, he died at the start of 2002, just as he was beginning to write it, but my book duly appeared a year later under the title L'artiste en philosophie politique.

So far, I have answered your question only by questioning it. I want to stress that, outside the Anglophone world, the country with which I have had the longest and strongest academic links has been France. I am sure, however, that you are right to say that the French university world only recently became seriously interested in British historiography. One possible explanation relates to the decline of Marxism as a historical methodology. During the heyday of Braudel and his disciples, it was widely assumed by French historians that, in Braudel's famous phrase, ‘mountains come first’ and that economies follow them. It was generally accepted that the most important historical questions were of a socio-economic character and that they needed to be addressed in quantitative terms. François Furet struck me as an interesting example of someone who had started out with these commitments but came to reject them completely. Perhaps this helps to explain why many other disenchanted people of his generation began to look outside France for different ways of thinking about the past, and consequently looked to Great Britain and, in François's case, to the United States.

These considerations hardly explain, however, why the work of someone like E. P. Thompson was, as you rightly say, only very slowly accepted in France. Thompson's classic work, The Making of the English Working Class, first appeared in 1963, but it was not translated into French until more than twenty-five years later. Yet Thompson was writing as a Marxist historian at a time when this approach was strongly ascendant. Perhaps the answer is that during those years the French were simply not very interested in the history of Great Britain at all. It is certainly striking that I can easily think of major British historians active in the middle decades of the twentieth century who specialised in the history of France – Richard Cobb, Alfred Cobban, George Rudé and many others. But I cannot think of a single comparably prominent French historian of that period who specialised in British history.

JB and Arnault Skornicki (AS): The penetration of your work in France and the positions that it entails are in any case today part of the struggles over the division of academic territories aimed at locating the place for a renewed history of political ideas within the fields of history and the social sciences. In fact, in his lectures ‘On the State’, Bourdieu was already calling for such a renewal of the history of political ideas. On 5 December 1991, he outlined a ‘programme for a social history of political ideas and the State’ (Bourdieu 2014: 339–342). In a striking way, he rediscovered a syntagm already coined in 1978 by Neal Wood: ‘The social history of political theory’.

In his contribution, Wood distinguished between two ways of approaching a political thinker: that of the specialist and that of the generalist. For the generalist who, accordingly, has less time, he suggested that, after familiarising himself with the texts of the author under consideration, ‘it may well be of greater value to read half a dozen books and monographs concerned with some aspects of the social history (broadly defined) of a period than a dozen or so commentaries upon the theorist himself’ (Wood 1978: 348). Wood urged historians of political ideas to learn to read social history for both interpretative and theoretical purposes. Bourdieu, on the other hand, did not mean ‘social history’ as Wood meant it in agreement with historians. He thought of a history of political ideas ‘as practiced by a sociologist’. Wood's perspective was Marxist, emphasising the connections between ideas and the social and material conditions of their production, as well as the way in which ideas expressed sociopolitical positions within given conflictual dynamics. Bourdieu, who seems to ignore Wood's contribution, did not reject this approach, even if he did make many jabs at the economic reductionism of some Marxists. Rather, he wished to complement it by insisting more on what he called the ‘material function’ of ideas.

We must quote him here: ‘it is only if [ideas] are seen to be both the product of social conditions and producers of social realities, constructors of social reality, that they can be fully understood.’ This is what he summarised as the meaning of his lecture ‘On the State’: ‘everything I have said throughout these lectures rests on the idea that ideas do things, that ideas make reality, and that the view of the world, the standpoint, the nomos, all those things I have mentioned a hundred times, are constructors of reality.’ We would have to extend the quotation further, but for our purposes here, we will limit ourselves to noting that Bourdieu attached this proposal – which Wood would probably have also shared – to the reading he was promoting of your own work. This is clear from the conclusions of the lecture of 28 November, which immediately precedes the one of 5 December: ‘Skinner relates a series of theories that are not just political theories which you can debate about in the way that philosophers do. They are political theories that have contributed to constructing the political world in which we speak about these theories, and in which we take a position on the basis of positions that were created by those theories’ (Bourdieu 2014: 337–338). What do you think of this way of reading and appropriating The Foundations of Modern Political Thought?

QS: You speak of Bourdieu in the early 1990s expressing the hope that there might be a renewal of the study of the history of political ideas. But this seems to me an example of the kind of standing back from the Anglophone academic world that we have already discussed. By the 1990s, no one would have spoken in Britain or the United States of hoping to renew the study of the history of political ideas, or of intellectual history more generally, because the renewal had already taken place. Perhaps the most obvious sign was the proliferation, beginning in the 1970s, of new journals in intellectual history and more specifically in the history of political thought. I am thinking of Political Theory and History of European Ideas, both founded in the 1970s, of History of Political Thought in the 1980s, of The Intellectual History Review in the 1990s and many similar initiatives since that time. If I may add a purely personal note, I tried myself to contribute in a modest way to the revival of the subject when Richard Rorty, Jerry Schneewind and I persuaded the Cambridge University Press in the early 1980s to begin publishing a series of monographs under the title Ideas in Context. I eventually co-edited the series with James Tully and by the time we handed over the editorship about five years ago, the Cambridge Press had published over a hundred monographs in intellectual history, especially in the history of social and political ideas.

I am very interested in what you say about Bourdieu's appropriation of Neal Wood's project for what they both described as a social history of political ideas. You ask how I would feel if my Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) were to be regarded as part of that program. I am bound to say that this would, in my view, involve a complete misunderstanding of what I was trying to say about the relations between political thinking and social life.

The problem with Wood's approach, it seems to me, is that it treats political ideas essentially as a reflection of something more real, and more specifically as rationalisations of socio-economic interests. It follows that our historical explanations must always operate basically at the socio-economic level. The study of people's social and political beliefs becomes of secondary importance and of no independent significance when it comes to explaining their behaviour. The main weakness of this approach seems to me to stem from its un-argued assumption that people's professed principles are generally rationalisations of their interests. This contention appears in some cases to be obviously false. Some people undoubtedly act out of moral or political principles that may be strongly at variance with their interests. Even if we accept Wood's basic premise, however, this by no means commits us to the kind of social history of ideas for which he pleaded. The reason is that even if our professed principles are mere rationalisations, they nevertheless help to construct rather than merely reflect the lineaments of our social world. We can see how this comes about as soon as we reflect on the crucial consideration that normally we can only hope to succeed in doing what we can manage to legitimise. As a result, we are generally committed to acting only in such ways as are compatible with the claim that we are motivated by our professed principles. But this in turn means that such principles will always have to be invoked when it comes to explaining our behaviour. This is because our conduct will always in part be limited and directed by the need to legitimise what we are doing. The explanation of what we are doing will therefore need to refer to the principles in the light of which we seek to legitimise our behaviour. This was one of the claims I was most of all concerned to underline in my Foundations of Modern Political Thought.

I agree, in other words, with what Bourdieu – after seemingly agreeing with Wood – eventually says about the project of a social history of ideas: that it needs to recognise that political ideas are not just the products but one of the producers of social reality. But how exactly does this happen? This is the question that Bourdieu seems to me not to answer. My own answer, as I have indicated, is that the force of ideas does not have to depend on their being motives; rather it arises from the need for legitimisation, in consequence of which our social conduct needs to remain compatible with the claim that it is motivated by some recognised normative principle, even in instances (or rather, especially in instances) where this is not the case. It's the need for legitimisation, in short, that constrains and thus helps to shape our political world. This is how it comes about that social and political ideas are, as Bourdieu rightly says, among the constructors of reality.

JB and AS: Finally, what Bourdieu sees as the key to his teaching in On the State may represent a version of Hegel's formula about the rationality of what is actual and the actuality of what is rational.

We have noted that Bourdieu multiplied cutting remarks against the analytical procedures of certain Marxist authors. You have had several opportunities to come back to the stimulus that C. B. Macpherson's classic book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes to Locke, published in 1962 when you were beginning your training as a researcher at Cambridge, represented for you on the negative side. That he was an important polemical target of your seminal essay ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ is perhaps even clearer in its original version, published in 1969 in History and Theory, than in the definitive version, as it appears in the first volume of Visions of Politics, where your contributions ‘regarding method’ are collected. In particular, you criticised the assumption that the identification of the social order presuppositions implicit in an author should allow the interpretation of possible contradictions and inconsistencies of this author.

However, your attitude towards Marxist historians, even in the 1960s, was not rigid. For example, you did not hesitate to acknowledge your indebtedness to some of Christopher Hill's work on the English Revolution. More recently, you pointed out how little a Marxist historian like him, who devoted a significant part of his work to the history of political ideas, lent himself to the caricature formed by the detractors of Marxist historiography. In your 1997 essay on Geoffrey Elton's textbook The Practice of History (1967), you wrote: ‘Nor can he [Elton] be thinking of the Marxist historian he most frequently attacks, Christopher Hill, for while it was undoubtedly an aspiration of classical Marxism to make use of historical materials to formulate predictive social laws, Christopher Hill has never exhibited anything more than a passing interest in that aspect of Marxist philosophy’ (Skinner 2002: 24). Would you like to tell us a bit more about your perception of the evolution of Marxist approaches to the history of political ideas over the course of your career?

QS: You ask about my perception of the evolution of Marxist approaches to the history of political theory during the course of my career. I would say that in Britain there is no such evolution to be traced. The Marxist approach reached its apogee at around the time when I was first starting research and has been in retreat ever since. But in saying this I don't want to sound like a Cold War anti-Marxist. There is something of great value in the Marxist tradition that I have always wanted to appropriate. I express this commitment in the preface to my Foundations of Modern Political Thought, where I maintain that ‘political life itself sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to appear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate’ (1978: xi). My only objection is to those Marxists who, in the manner of Neal Wood, assume that this must be equivalent to saying that social being determines consciousness. As I have been stressing, I believe by contrast that consciousness always helps to determine social being. This is because the way in which social and political arguments evolve depends in part on the extent to which new projects can be legitimised. But this process of legitimisation can only operate through the successful invocation and manipulation of existing normative values, the character of which always helps to explain the specific direction taken by social and political change. As I've said, this is one of the general claims I try to illustrate throughout my Foundations of Modern Political Thought.

JB and AS: In reconsidering your 1969 groundbreaking essay today, it becomes clearer how the historiography with which you crossed swords when you developed your thinking on the method of the history of political ideas was then exclusively Anglo-Saxon. You were trained at a time – is that not so? – when the debate on methodology was particularly lively at Oxford and Cambridge; it was in this domain that you first left your imprints; and it was in this context that you distinguished yourself by seeking and finding a singular solution with fruitful outcomes. Your initial audience of course shaped you as a researcher and speaker, limiting the frames of agreement in which you could situate your argument. But, in the end, this audience also broadened quite early in your career.

Now, on the continent too, the 1960s were fertile in terms of reflections and results in this field, especially in Germany and Italy. To speak only of Italy, particularly in Turin. And to limit ourselves to a single example concerning a political theorist of the fourteenth century, whose anachronistic uses you denounced in your essay, let us remember Carlo Pincin's monograph on Marsilius of Padua. Published in 1967, it testifies to the maturity of an approach that escapes most of your critics of the history of ideas, while at the same time responding fairly well to the later definition of the social history of political theory when a singular author is the subject of it.

After your 1969 essay, a large part of your work has focused on Italian political thought of the Renaissance. Even your studies of Hobbes – one of the authors who has most captured your attention – are concerned with placing his thought in a broader context in which Italian Renaissance political culture plays a prominent role. Yet nothing in your writings points to a special attention to Italian historiography, even though the latter has developed one of the strongest traditions in the history of political ideas in the twentieth century. It distanced itself quite early from the idealistic tendencies of the philosophical mode of analysis that you too have criticised. Carlo Pincin was, for example, a student of Luigi Firpo, who was one of the main promoters of this Italian tradition.

Heir to the great scholar Benedetto Croce, concerned with philology, language and history, Firpo showed no particular interest in the aspect of Croce's work that found most resonance in England – thanks to R. G. Collingwood – that is, the philosophy of history. And it is quite remarkable that when he conceived and edited the monumental Storia delle idee politiche, economiche e sociali in six volumes (Turin, 1972–1987), whose introduction presents an epistemology of the history of ideas, Firpo solicited contributions, so to speak, from hardcore historians. These few elements should be enough to illustrate the feeling of a missed rendezvous. How would you explain it from your point of view?

QS: You are certainly justified in saying that my early methodological and philosophical articles engaged almost exclusively with the Anglophone scholarly literature. I should have known, for example, about Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960), but I am ashamed to say that I only read the book when it was translated in 1974, although after that I commented on it. By contrast, I read Derrida's Grammatology soon after it was published. (I should explain that in those days my French was fluent, but my German was almost non-existent.) But Derrida's writings came too late for me to engage with them in my early work, and it was only in my later methodological essays that I found anything to say about Derrida's hermeneutics. (My comments appear in Regarding Method, the first volume of my Visions of Politics, which appeared in 2002.) The only excuse I can offer for this parochial approach is that what concerned me in the 1960s was something that seemed amiss specifically in Anglophone teaching and research. I should say in my defence, however, that this was far from being a parochial audience to address, because the Anglophone university system is a worldwide one. I should also say that, if we are speaking about parochialism, it's worth noting that in an analogous way Gadamer and Derrida had almost nothing to say about Anglophone traditions of thought.

I must correct you when you say that my formation took place at a time when, as you put it, there was a lively debate in Oxford and Cambridge about questions of historical method. Political theory was at that time taught in Oxford in an almost purely analytical idiom, with scarcely any space for history. Alasdair MacIntyre was virtually the only person then teaching in Oxford who was reflecting in what seemed to me a fresh and rewarding style on questions of method. As for Cambridge, there was almost no debate at all when I first began research in the early 1960s. The one exception I should mention is that John Pocock, who had studied in Cambridge during the 1950s, published a pioneering and very influential article on questions of method in the history of ideas in 1962. But when I began to deliver a course of lectures on historical method in Cambridge in the late 1960s, this was the first time since the days of Michael Oakeshott that any such teaching had been provided by the Faculty of History. When John Dunn, my exact contemporary at Cambridge, published his article ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’ in 1968, this was one of the earliest statements of the intellectual commitments associated with what later came to be called the ‘Cambridge School’. When Pocock, Dunn and I were starting out, there was almost nothing in the way of a debate to which we could contribute; rather we were trying to initiate a debate.

You complain that I have never paid any attention to Italian scholarship on the history of political thought. You speak of my failure to engage with this tradition as ‘a missing rendezvous’ and you ask me to explain why it failed to take place. I must admit that when I was writing my Foundations of Modern Political Thought in the 1970s, it was the German tradition of scholarship on the Italian Renaissance and the way in which it had been taken up in the United States that seemed to me of the greatest value and interest. But I now feel that there is certainly a missing rendezvous with Italian scholarship in my book, and I was justly criticised (and, in the case of Sergio Bertelli, angrily criticised) for not taking it more seriously. You give as an example my failure to discuss Carlo Pincin's study of Marsilius of Padua, published in 1967, and this is certainly one of the gaps in my reading that I regret. It's also true that I never made use of the monumental series of studies on the history of ideas edited by Luigi Firpo, although I should say in my defence that these volumes only began to appear when I was well advanced with writing my own book.

However, when I began to concentrate on Renaissance political theory in the early 1980s, I spent a great deal of time catching up with Italian scholarship. I read Artifoni, Alessio, Castellani, Folena, Franceschi, Minio-Paluello, Sorbelli and many others on the origins of Italian humanism. I read Calasso, Chittolini, Costa and Mochi Onory on the evolution of Italian legal thought. I read Carli, Donato, Eorsi and Frugoni on early Italian political painting. I read Bertelli, Chabod, Chiappelli, Guarini, Prezzolini, Ridolfi, Sasso and many others on the political theory of Machiavelli. I read Battista, Borrelli, Cozzi and Maffei on the later Italian Renaissance. I also read De Rosa, Pampaloni and Silvano on the political history of Florence at the time of Machiavelli, as well as a number of more general studies on Italian Renaissance humanism, including those of Ercole and Garin. If you look at Volume II of my Visions of Politics, the volume entitled Renaissance Virtues (2002), in which I included a number of my articles from the 1980s, you will find all these scholars cited and their work discussed.

From my Renaissance studies I returned in the 1990s to studying Hobbes, whose civil science had been the first subject of my research in the 1960s. Here too I tried to take proper account of Italian scholarship. Arrigo Pacchi had published a brilliant book on Hobbes's natural philosophy as early as 1965 and I had corresponded with Pacchi about it. Gianni Paganini was starting in the 1990s to publish his path-finding research on the Renaissance background of Hobbes's philosophy and I likewise corresponded with him and met to discuss his work. Pasquale Pasquino, Gigliola Rossini and many others were also writing about Hobbes at the time. If you look at Volume III of my Visions of Politics, the volume entitled Hobbes and Civil Science (2002), you will find all these scholars cited and discussed. When I reflect on my range of reading, I confess that I am rather shocked to be accused of never having paid any attention to Italian scholarship.

JB and AS: Before asking you some questions on your relationship to the social sciences, we would like to draw your attention to the contribution of a French author, Pierre Legendre, who is often critical of the social sciences and who today has behind him a daring work of anthropological interpretation of Western civilisation. This contribution appeared in the Annali della fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa in 1966 (No. 3, pp. 254–274), under a title we could translate into English as follows: ‘Evolution of administrative systems and history of ideas: the example of French thought’.

Pierre Legendre, who is ten years your elder, had published mainly on the history of medieval learned law. In 1966, he had probably begun work on his textbook Histoire de l'Administration, de 1750 à nos jours, published in 1968 (with a second edition in 1992, under the new title Trésor historique de l'État en France: L'administration classique), which he accompanied with a breviary of administrative documents and writings on the formation of administrative science, from Jean Domat to Max Weber. At the heart of the matter was the relationship between territory, bureaucracy and freedom, and the themes of centralism and anti-centralism. The target audience was primarily law school students, but his textbook was a call to ‘radically transform the teaching of history’. He would specify later on his conviction that ‘the art of studying institutions thus comprises an inevitable passage, [through] historical erudition’, this erudition having to place great emphasis on texts, language and ideas.

Here are the first lines of his 1966 contribution:

Administrative thought, so preoccupied today with keeping up with the development of organizational sciences, deserves to be observed in more than one respect. As a process of rationalization of experiences or of predictive analysis, it necessarily accompanies governmental action. Historically, it is only a secondary effect of the growth of the State, of which it reveals certain essential psycho-sociological aspects. In the present attempts to grasp, with a view to modifying them, the characteristics of national systems of administration, the history of ideas contributes to the evaluation of mental structures, an important factor in the evolution of different types of organization. The doctrines of the past are never completely abolished, being the foundation of the present: the succession of theses is not a juxtaposition, but a superposition, whose various elements support each other, at the same time consolidated and renewed by time.

From the point of view of your experience as a historian of political ideas, and as a researcher, a teacher and an editor, how do you respond today to these proposals by Pierre Legendre?

QS: I am sorry to say that I have never made any use of Pierre Legendre's work, and indeed I know of him only as a student of medieval Roman law. But the passage you quote sounds interesting and it is certainly important – as Max Weber was celebrated for emphasising – to understand the kind of thinking that underlies and helps to explain the behaviour of modern bureaucracies. I also agree with what you quote Legendre as saying about one of the ways in which intellectual history can be of contemporary use and relevance. He speaks of the strong continuities that have marked our thinking about the state and he appears to be arguing that a historical understanding of their evolution can help us to understand our present institutions and arrangements. You ask how I react to this argument. I strongly agree with it, but I have always preferred in my own scholarship to emphasise discontinuities rather than continuities. There is I think an ineradicable danger – this is something that Foucault always liked to point out – of naturalising our concepts, of assuming that our ways of thinking about the social world must be the ways of thinking about it. This being so, it seems to me a particular value of intellectual history that it can sometimes manage to uncover and confront us with dramatically different ways of thinking, even about some of our most familiar and fundamental beliefs.

This is the claim I attempted to defend in my book Liberty before Liberalism (1998). There, I note that, in the legal tradition stemming from the Digest of Roman law, the discussion always begins with a taxonomy of persons in which the basic distinction is between free persons and slaves. We are being told, in other words, that to understand the concept of liberty, what we need to grasp is what it means to be a slave. The answer given in the Digest is that to be a slave is to live in potestate, in subjection to the arbitrary will of someone else. It follows that to be a liber homo, a free person, must be to live in a condition in which you are sui iuris, able to act independently of subjection to anyone else's will.

It hardly needs saying that this is not how we currently think about liberty. Rather it is a commonplace of contemporary political theory that to be free is simply to be unimpeded from exercising our powers at will. It is absence of interference, not absence of dependence, that is held to mark the presence of liberty. But the historian will want to ask, is it possible that this prevailing understanding may amount to little more than an ideological construction that masks from us some of what we most need to think about when we ask what it means to be a free agent? This is the question I raised at the end of Liberty before Liberalism, where I proposed that the past may sometimes be a repository of buried treasure. Historians may be able to help us stand back from our current assumptions and prejudices and show us alternative readings of some of our concepts that may be well worth excavating, dusting down and reappropriating for our own purposes. Legendre, in the passage you quote, argues that the past can illuminate the present by disclosing how arguments have been consolidated over time. But what I am saying is that it can sometimes be of even greater educational value to make a study of arguments that have been abandoned or set aside over time, asking how much may have been lost in this process rather than gained.

You ask me to react to Legendre's argument from my perspective as a historian of political ideas. But I want to emphasise that I do not think of myself exclusively – or nowadays even primarily – as a historian of political ideas. I have not held a position as a teacher of this subject for over twenty years: at Cambridge between 1996 and 2008 I held the Chair in Modern History, and in London since 2008 I have held a Chair in the Humanities. The two principal books I have published during these years have both been contributions to the history of classical rhetoric, which has always been one of my major scholarly interests. One of these, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), examines Hobbes's changing attitude to rhetorical ‘invention’ as a system of argument. The other, Forensic Shakespeare (2014), isolates a group of plays in which Shakespeare makes use of classical theories of ‘invention’ to structure a number of pivotal speeches and scenes. Both of these monographs are large and specialised texts, so I do not expect that either of them will ever be translated into French. But in the Anglophone academic world they would I think be regarded – rightly in my view – as my two most significant works of scholarship.

JB and AS: You have had occasion to emphasise the major role of Collingwood's work for you. His 1939 autobiography, in which he gives an account of the development of his conception of history, was recently translated into French under the title Toute histoire est histoire d'une pensée (2010). This title brings Collingwood himself back to one of his major propositions – strongly tinged with idealism, and which he deduced from Hegel, perhaps through Benedetto Croce – that ‘all history is the history of thought’. Collingwood considered the distinction between political history and the history of political ideas to be illusory: according to him, ‘the historian is not concerned with events as such but with actions, i.e., events brought about by the will and expressing the thought of a free and intelligent agent and discovers this thought by rethinking it in his own mind’ (Collingwood 2005: 178).

The title of your introduction to the first volume of Visions of Politics seems to express this thesis: ‘Seeing things their way’. Your methodological reflection has not been limited to a history of political ideas sensu stricto: it extends to the philosophy of social action. According to you, political discourses are one modality among others of this action, and the historian must restore the conventions of his times to grasp their meaning. On this point, you have very clearly placed your reflection in the wake of the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Austin, taking up in particular the latter's notion of ‘speech act’. It allows us to shift the question of the meaning of statements to that of their uses and the intentions of the speakers, intentions that cannot be reduced to the subjectivity of the latter but are relative to a given elocutionary context.

In your work, the reference to a disciple of Wittgenstein who himself extended Collingwood's reflection on the method of history appears more discreetly, though recurrently: Peter Winch. His 1958 book The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy was recently translated into French (in 2009). From the perspective of a ‘social history of political ideas’ that we are concerned with here, it seems interesting to us to ask you to situate more precisely what Winch's thought has brought to you.

QS: May I first say how grateful I am to you for providing such a clear and accurate summary of my approach to the interpretation of texts. You first ask about Collingwood's influence on historians of political ideas in the 1960s. I was certainly very much influenced by Collingwood myself. But this was, I think, unusual, and he was not much studied in Britain at the time. When John Passmore assigned him a central place in his brilliant survey A Hundred Years of Philosophy, first published in 1957, this was widely regarded as a highly eccentric judgement.

You speak of Collingwood's appropriation from Benedetto Croce of the proposition that all history is the history of thought. I should stress that I have never been attracted by this aspect of Collingwood's thought. As you note, his contention arose out of his insistence that all human history is the history of action, and that all action is the product of thought. But this contention has always struck me as dogmatic and blinkered. When we study the past, we are not merely interested in voluntary actions. We are also interested in events, in trends and traditions, and in the general processes of social and economic change. I should add that I was not in fact referring to this aspect of Collingwood's thinking – as you suggest I may have been doing – when I spoke in the preface to Regarding Method about the importance of ‘seeing things their way’. Rather I was issuing a warning against the dangers of anachronism. I was reminding historians not to assume that when our forebears used the same terms as we now use, they must have meant the same thing. I was also exhorting historians to try to make sense of the world of our forebears by attempting so far as possible to recover what it may have been rational for them to believe, even if it would not be rational for us to believe the same things.

There was, however, one aspect of Collingwood's thinking in his Autobiography that deeply impressed me: his analysis of what he called the logic of question and answer. It was largely due to Collingwood's influence that I arrived at my basic suggestion that we should think of texts not merely as bodies of propositions but also as answers to specific questions. When I started to think in this way my perspective completely changed. Philosophy no longer appeared as a subject in which we encounter different answers to a canonical set of questions. Rather it began to look as if the questions as well as the answers continually changed. Nor did the study of the history of philosophy seem so obviously a matter of examining a canonical body of texts. If the aim is in part to recover the questions to which any given text can be seen as an answer, then this requires us to look beyond the texts towards the circumstances in which they were formed. It was Collingwood whom I had in mind in the passage I have already quoted from my Foundations of Modern Political Thought, in which I argue that political life sets the main problems for the political theorist, and that the history of political theory can most fruitfully be seen as a series of interventions in pre-existing conversations and debates.

You mention that Peter Winch's book, The Idea of a Social Science, has recently been translated into French and you ask me what I have taken from Winch's philosophy. The answer is that as far as I am aware I have taken nothing from Winch at all, although I have certainly been deeply influenced by Wittgenstein, the hero of Winch's book. I comment on Winch's position in my book Regarding Method, in which I contend that at the heart of his argument lies a misunderstanding of what Wittgenstein was claiming when he spoke about a Lebensform or ‘form of life’. Winch takes Wittgenstein to be saying that different forms of life hang together in such a way that we cannot properly criticise them from the outside but can only give an account of their internal coherence. Winch thinks that if I criticise an agent in an alien culture or a different historical period for holding an irrational belief, then I am merely imposing an ‘external’ understanding of what counts as rationality and applying it in an anachronistic and even an imperialist way. I agree of course that, as I have been saying, we need as historians to try to see things as far as possible in our forebears’ terms. But it by no means follows that we cannot criticise their beliefs, and indeed it seems to me essential to ask if their beliefs are rationally held if we want to explain them. The reason is that if I conclude that a person holds a belief that it is not rational for them to accept, then my explanation of why the person nevertheless accepts it will take a different form than in the case of a rational belief. The causes of irrationality are of a different order to the causes of rationality.

When we proceed in this way, however, we are not necessarily importing and applying an alien view of what counts as rationality. We may only be claiming that, according to the canons prevailing in the society we are studying about the formation and criticism of beliefs, some particular belief may not have been an appropriate one for the person we are investigating to have held. It is, for example, a deep question as to whether it was epistemically rational for the Church's spokesmen, in their debate with Galileo, to insist that the sun travelled round the earth. This belief is of course false, but the crucial question is whether it may nevertheless have been rational for the Church's spokesmen to have held it to be true. On the one hand, it may well have been epistemically rational to do so because the structure of their beliefs may have made it rational for them to discount evidence that we should regard as relevant.

But on the other hand, it may not have been rational, because their deepest interests may have prompted them to repudiate and set aside what they knew to be relevant evidence. We need to know whether or not the Church's beliefs about heliocentrism were arrived at by rational processes before we can embark on the task of explaining their attitude to Galileo, because otherwise we shall not know what there is to explain. But this is not to say that we are importing an alien understanding of rationality. We are only asking if the Church's beliefs were rationally held according to the canons of evidence and argument prevailing at the time. I should add that I can see no reason why Wittgenstein would not have accepted this line of argument, since I can see no reason for treating him, as Winch does, as a conceptual relativist.

JB and AS: In The Idea of a Social Science, Winch sought to philosophically build the social sciences by opposing the application of models from the natural sciences to the study of social action. According to him, to understand a social action amounts to grasping the meaning of a conversation: though obeying shared rules and conventions, it entails dimensions that are unforeseeable and irreducible to social laws. Winch summarised his effort as follows:

I have also tried to show that social relations really exist only in and through the ideas which are current in society; or alternatively; that social relations fall into the same logical category as do relations between ideas. It follows that social relations must be an equally unsuitable subject for generalizations and theories of the scientific sort to be formulated about them. Historical explanation is not the application of generalizations and theories to particular instances: it is the tracing of internal relations. (Winch 1990: 133)

By making the history of ideas the model of intelligibility of history and social action, does not Winch run the risk of obscuring the complex relations between ideas and interests, by neglecting the driving force of the latter?

QS: As I have indicated with my example of Galileo's debate with the Catholic Church, it seems to me that your implied criticism of Winch here is fully justified: we need to distinguish epistemic from practical rationality. It was undoubtedly practically rational for the Church's spokesmen to deny Galileo's argument because so much of their world view was threatened by the hypothesis of heliocentrism. The question is whether it was also epistemically rational for them to do so or whether this was a case in which the force of interests overpowered the force of argument. Winch's talk about the integrity of ‘forms of life’ leaves him no space to address the latter possibility. Worse still, it leaves him with little prospect of ever being able to explain the processes of intellectual change.

Your quotation from Winch brings out what seems to me a further weakness in his argument. He claims that historical explanations need to take the form of tracing what he calls the ‘internal relations’ between beliefs and behaviour. He regards the motives out of which individual agents act as ‘internally’ related to their resulting actions, in consequence of which he claims that causal explanation must be inapplicable to human behaviour. It is true that many actions may be said to have conventional meanings attached to them. This is certainly a point that Wittgenstein emphasises, and it may be that this is what Winch has in mind when he speaks about ‘internal relations’, although I must confess that I am not at all sure what he means by this phrase. But I do not see why it is supposed to follow that social science should not also be concerned with causes, and indeed I cannot even see why the motives that prompt us to act should not be construed as the causes of which our resulting actions are effects.

JB and AS: Let us note that to support his demonstration, Winch mobilises Weberian epistemology in a very critical way. Your attitude towards Weber is very different. He remains, within the sociological tradition, one of the authors to whom you refer most favourably.

The theses of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) penetrated England thanks to Richard H. Tawney's work Religion and the Rise of Capitalism a few years before the publication of Talcott Parsons's translation (1930). They were then much discussed in the context of the lively debate on the Protestant origins of English economic and political ‘modernity’ and on the role of religious ideas in the ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ that culminated in the Great Rebellion (1641–1649). One thinks, for example, of Hugh Trevor-Roper, a great leader of controversies, and of his polemic with Christopher Hill, which is part of a remarkable exchange between intellectual and social history.

The second part of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought is devoted to the Reformation period and constitutes a direct intervention in this debate. It was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, of which you were a member between 1974 and 1979, that you developed this work, but your commitment to Weber's theses is clear from your 1974 contribution Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action. This commitment has been truly lasting: for example, in Visions of Politics, this 1974 contribution appears so thoroughly reworked that you consider it ‘a new piece of work’.

The Weberian theory of legitimacy and social action has provided a powerful weapon against the Marxist interpretation of modern political thought by revalorising the role of ideas and political idioms, and relativising that of economic and social interests without excluding it. Can Max Weber's methodological and historical contribution to the history of ideas nevertheless constitute, in your opinion, a possible path for a ‘social history of ideas’ which, without being deterministic, would not ignore the role of the interests of the social groups that lend force to these ideas?

QS: I think there is certainly a way of reading Weber that would make him an exemplary historian of ideas, but I am not sure if it is a convincing way of reading him. When, as you rightly say, R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism drew on Weber's work, he seems to have assumed that Weber in his essays on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was mounting a causal argument. Tawney focused on the emergence of what he took to be a distinctively Protestant emphasis on individual effort, hard work, punctuality, conscientiousness and other social values that in turn seemed to encourage a capitalist way of life. But the suggestion that Protestantism may have directly helped in this way to cause the triumph of capitalism does not seem to have been Weber's argument.

Weber speaks not in causal terms but merely – using a phrase of Goethe's – of an ‘elective affinity’ between the two movements, and I must confess that what he wants to say about how Protestantism may have aided capitalism remains to me opaque. You kindly mention my essay of 1974, in which I raised this difficulty. I go on to propose that there may be a different way of reading the relationship between the two movements, and that this may possibly have been what Weber had in mind. I suggest – and I would still want to say – that the way in which Protestantism may have aided the rise of capitalism may have been through being particularly well suited not to promoting but to legitimising the values of commercial and capitalist life. This joins up with what I was saying earlier in our discussion about the dependence of social action on legitimisation, and would have the effect of turning Weber into a practitioner of the sort of intellectual history that I most want to see practised.

I should end by noting, however, that my main concern in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was with a completely different aspect of the argument about the impact of Protestantism in early modern Europe. At the time when I was writing, a number of prominent Anglophone historians – most notably Julian Franklin and Michael Walzer – were insisting on a close connection between Protestantism and constitutionalism. Due to the need to defend themselves against extirpation, they argued, it was the Protestants who first articulated the idea of a standing right of resistance against tyrannical government. I tried to show that what in fact happened was that, especially in France, the Protestant churches drew on much deeper resources in Roman law and Catholic theology in which the rights of peoples to control their governments, and hence to resist tyranny, had already been affirmed. This is perhaps a good note on which to end, because it meant that in order to write Volume II of my Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I had to turn myself into a historian of France. It was in the course of the French religious wars, I argued, that these earlier traditions of thinking were developed in such a way as to yield the first systematic statements of modern constitutionalist thought.

Note

1

Volume I came out in July 2018, ten months after the publication of this interview in French (editors’ note).

References

  • Bourdieu, P. 2014. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France 1989–1992. Ed. P. Champagne et al., trans. D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity.

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  • Collingwood, R. G. (1946) 2005. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Skinner, Q. 2002. Visions of Politics, Vol. I: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Winch, P. (1958) 1990. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd edn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

  • Wood, N. 1978. ‘The Social History of Political Theory’, Political Theory 6 (3): 345367.

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Theoria

A Journal of Social and Political Theory

  • Bourdieu, P. 2014. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France 1989–1992. Ed. P. Champagne et al., trans. D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Collingwood, R. G. (1946) 2005. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Skinner, Q. 2002. Visions of Politics, Vol. I: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Winch, P. (1958) 1990. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd edn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

  • Wood, N. 1978. ‘The Social History of Political Theory’, Political Theory 6 (3): 345367.

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