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Citizens to Lords. Ellen WoodЧитать онлайн книгу.

Citizens to Lords - Ellen  Wood


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where they stand in the conflicts of their day. The failure to acknowledge this meant that these scholars saw little benefit in trying to understand the classics by situating them in their author’s time and place. The contextualization of political thought or the ‘sociology of knowledge’ might tell us something about the ideas and motivations of lesser mortals and ideologues, but it could tell us nothing worth knowing about a great philosopher, a genius like Plato.

      It will now be evident why I wish to maintain that, if the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice. For it now appears that, in recovering the terms of the normative vocabulary available to any given agent for the description of his political behaviour, we are at the same time indicating one of the constraints upon his behaviour itself. This suggests that, in order to explain why such an agent acts as he does, we are bound to make some reference to this vocabulary, since it evidently figures as one of the determinants of his action. This in turn suggests that, if we were to focus our histories on the study of these vocabularies, we might be able to illustrate the exact ways in which the explanation of political behaviour depends upon the study of political thought.

      Skinner’s approach has certain very clear strengths; and other members of the Cambridge School have also applied these principles, often very effectively, to the analysis of specific thinkers or ‘traditions of discourse’, especially those of early modern England. The proposition that the political questions addressed by political theorists, including the great ones, are thrown up by real political life and are shaped by the historical conditions in which they arise seems hardly more nor less than good common sense.

      But much depends on what the Cambridge School regards as a relevant context, and it soon becomes clear that contextualization has a different meaning than might be inferred from Skinner’s reference to the ‘social and intellectual matrix’. It turns out that the ‘social’ matrix has little to do with ‘society’, the economy, or even the polity. The social context is itself intellectual, or at least the ‘social’ is defined by, and only by, existing vocabularies. The ‘political life’ that sets the agenda for theory is essentially a language game. In the end, to contextualize a text is to situate it among other texts, among a range of vocabularies, discourses and ideological paradigms at various levels of formality, from the classics of political thought down to ephemeral screeds or political speeches. What emerges from Skinner’s assault on purely textual histories or the abstract history of ideas is yet another kind of textual history, yet another history of ideas – certainly more sophisticated and comprehensive than what went before, but hardly less limited to disembodied texts.

      This emphasis on the local and particular does not, however, preclude consideration of larger spans of time and space. The ‘traditions of discourse’ that are the stuff of the Cambridge


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