Review: Quentin Skinner's 'Post-modern' History of Ideas

Author(s): ROBERT LAMB

Review by: ROBERT LAMB
Source: History, Vol. 89, No. 3 (295) (July 2004), pp. 424-433
Published by: Wiley
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 Feature Book Review Quentin Skinner's
'Post-modern' History of Ideas
ROBERT LAMB
University of Exeter

Visions of Politics, Volume I: Regarding Method. Volume II: Renaissance

Virtues. Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science. By Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge University Press. 2002. 226pp. 482pp. 440pp. £16.99 each (pb).

historians, Quentin Skinner is also one of the most controversial.

Customarily described
This status is due aswith
to his association one the of the world's
'Cambridge School' leadi
approach to the history of ideas, prominent since the late 1960s. Along
side others such as J. G. A. Pocock, John Dunn, Richard Tuck and James
Tully, Skinner has passionately made the case for a particular 'contextual
ist' interpretation of historical texts - one that locates the meaning of a
text in the authorial intentions identifiable through the study of linguistic
conventions.1 Of all these scholars, it is Skinner who has made the most
effort to devise and delineate a workable methodology and guide to
historical practice. However, he has not attempted any comprehensive,
book-length, defence of his underpinning philosophy, which makes him
something of a moving target for his critics. One such critic, Preston
King, was surely speaking for many when he petitioned Skinner 'to bring
together his various methodological essays' and 'publish them as a
connected statement'.2
Thankfully, Skinner has finally addressed this issue in the form of
Visions of Politics, a lavish three-volume collection of his writings. The set

The author would like to thank Iain Hampsher-Monk for helpful comments on this piece.
1 Although it is possible to refer to a 'contextualist' approach to the history of ideas, there are
substantial differences between the work of its main practitioners, in terms of both methodological
justifications and historical practice. For example. Skinner's writings differ significantly from those
of Pocock, whose work has (mostly) been concerned with the large-scale tracing of political
languages. See J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (1972) and Virtue, Commerce and History
(Cambridge, 1985) for statements on method and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political
Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975) for the best practical example. Despite the
apparent differences between Skinner and Pocock, the two scholars do refer to their projects as related.
2 P. King, 'The Twentieth Century: A History of the History of Ideas', Thinking Past a Problem:
Essays on the History of Ideas (2000), p. 83.

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 ROBERT LAMB 425

as a whole runs to over 1,000 pages, containing thirty-three substantial

essays, the origins of which span the last thirty-five years. Though only
one of the essays is entirely new,3 the rest have been comprehensively
revised and often extended for republication, with the aim of setting out
a complete articulation of his historical theory and practice. Two of the
three volumes are devoted to Skinner's work 'in the field', as an historian
approaching first the political texts of the Renaissance, and second the
starkly contrasting writing and ideological background of Thomas
Hobbes. However, it is in the first (and slimmest) volume, Regarding
Method, that Skinner, 'writing as a practising historian reflecting on the
task in hand',4 offers the clearest account of his methodology so far. The
publication of this collection provides a timely opportunity to offer an
exposition and assessment of Skinner's vision of historical practice and
to scrutinize any crucial developments.
Skinner's first article on historical method, published in 1969,5 was a
predominantly critical piece, attacking the unhistorical way in which
scholars in the history of political thought tended to treat past political
or philosophical texts. His charge was that the study of the history of
ideas was characterized by crass inaccuracies and unsustainable 'mytholo
gies'. His broadside was directed at what he regarded as two reigning
methodological orthodoxies. The first avoided paying any attention to
historical context when examining a text. This method tended to create
caricatures out of past thinkers, partly through assessing them according
to contemporary standards of moral argument, making the history of
ideas 'a pack of tricks we play on the dead'.6 Judging past thinkers in this
moralizing way allowed scholars to brand Rousseau a 'totalitarian' and
describe Machiavelli as an 'evil man'.7 This approach was considered
anachronistic in that the scholar attributed concepts to the author that
were not in existence at the time in which the text was written. For
example, Skinner noted the apparent contradiction in identifying John
Locke as a 'liberal' political thinker whilst also maintaining that he
founded the liberal tradition of political thought. The first claim cannot
hold, on the grounds that 'Locke can scarcely have intended to contribute
to a school of political philosophy which, so this interpretation suggests,
it was his great achievement to have made possible'.8 Skinner's claim is
that such fallacies arise when scholars treat past authors as if they are

3 This is chapter 12, entitled 'Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation and the English Civil
War'. See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols., Cambridge University Press, 2002) [hereafter
Visions], ii. 308-43.
4 Skinner, 'Introduction: Seeing Things Their Way', Visions, i. 1.
5 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas', originally published in History and The
ory, viii (1969) [hereafter Skinner, 'Meaning and Understanding], 3—53. Republished with revisions
in Visions, i. 57-89.
6 Skinner, 'Meaning and Understanding', Visions, i. 65.
7 This view was expressed by Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, 111., 1958), p. 9. The
rehabilitation of Machiavelli's reputation has been an interest of Skinner's for some time. See
Visions, ii. 142-212, and Machiavelli (Oxford, 1981).
8 Skinner, 'Meaning and Understanding', Visions, i. 74.

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426 QUENTIN SKINNER'S HISTORY OF IDEAS

engaged in 'eternal debates' over 'perennial issues', rather than address

ing local, specific objectives. By ignoring the surrounding context, and
searching for answers purely through objective textual analysis, scholars
necessarily ignore the intentions of the original author and this leads to
historical blunders.
The second orthodoxy attacked by Skinner had Marxist roots. This
method often treated past political writings as necessarily ideological
expressions of prevailing economic and social structures. The Marxist in
question was C. B. Macpherson, whose The Political Theory of Possessive
Individualism (1962) attempted to write the history of seventeenth-century
political thought as a history of the moral justification of capitalism.9
Though Skinner was not initially explicit in his critique of Macpherson,
he has recently confessed that it was his book, which 'disturbed [him]
enormously', that was the 'second target' of his 'manifesto'.10
In place of these two misfiring approaches, Skinner offers his own innov
ative, alternative method of historical analysis. He begins by stressing
the necessarily local and specific nature of any political or philosophical
argument:
any statement is inescapably the embodiment of a particular intention on
a particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem,
and is thus specific to its context in a way that it can only be naïve to try
to transcend . . . there are no perennial questions in philosophy. There are
only individual answers to individual questions, and potentially as many
different questions as there are questioners."

Skinner's claim is that this particularity requires that when considering a

text, the historian must try to enter the world of the author in order to 'see
things their way' and reveal the intentions behind a text. The historian
must discover the 'individual question' being addressed in a text, some
thing that requires detailed knowledge of the linguistic framework within
which the author had to work.
Skinner introduces the philosopher J. L. Austin's notion of 'speech-acts'
as a way of overcoming the apparent difficulty of accurately revealing the
intentions of an author. The idea here is that when one composes a text,
one is automatically advancing an utterance with its own 'illocutionary
force': speaking is, by definition, performing an action. The nature of the
action in question can then be determined by examining the types of

9 Over the last thirty years, 'the Macpherson thesis' has been widely discredited. For critical
discussions of his work, see Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of
C. B. Macpherson, ed. J. H. Carens (New York, 1993).
10 Skinner elaborates on this in an interview in M. L. Pallares-Burke, The New History: Confessions
and Conversations (2002) [hereafter The New History], pp. 212-40. Of Macpherson's book, he
writes: 'I thought it was a tremendous piece of writing, a tremendously insightful way of thinking
about Hobbes's and Locke's texts, but at the same time, I thought there was something profoundly
wrong about seeing their doctrines as a kind of reflex of the deep social and economic structures of
their society. I didn't like that at all, although I now feel I wasn't at all successful in explaining in
my manifesto what I didn't like about it' (ibid., p. 219).
11 Skinner, 'Meaning and Understanding', Visions, i. 88.

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 ROBERT LAMB 427

action that were available to the author at the time of composition. Thus,
since the category of 'bourgeois man' was not present in the seventeenth
century linguistic framework surrounding Hobbes, the historian can
safely reject Macpherson's claim that this concept occupies a central
place in Hobbes's thought.
In addition to dispelling myths, the historian is in a position to deter
mine (as far as possible) the political meaning of an author's argument
- which could be either to subvert or to legitimate established social
norms. Moreover, it is only through such an approach that an historian
can appreciate certain genres of political statements, such as works that
are intended to be ironic or sarcastic. An example he provides is Daniel
Defoe's The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which if read simply
textually, appears to be a case against religious toleration and for capital
punishment, rather than what it was intended to be, a subversive work of
parody, a reductio ad absurdum of a rival political standpoint. The point
is that by ignoring intentions, the interpreter is always potentially mask
ing the historical meaning of an utterance. Thus, rather than trying to
discover what a past thinker 'has to say' to contemporary philosophy -
which Skinner contends is an impossible task anyway - the historian
concentrates on what the thinker was saying in his particular context.
Skinner has himself sought to apply this method to a number of figures in
the history of ideas, most notably in the cases of Machiavelli and Hobbes.12
Skinner's writings on method have definitely polarized scholars work
ing in the field of the history of ideas and his work rarely encounters
responses of indifference. On the one hand, he has inspired many,13
whilst on the other he has attracted quite venomous criticism.14 Although
his detractors have raised various points of criticism, he has been par
ticularly sensitive to one recurring accusation. This has been the charge
that his method 'robs the subject of its point',15 since, for many, the
purpose of studying the history of ideas was (tacitly, at least) to gain
access to a vast range of different ideas about politics, morality and the
good life. By turning attention towards the necessarily parochial nature
of ideas, and further insisting that individuals cannot transcend their
context through abstract argument. Skinner has been accused of leaving
the history of ideas with merely 'the dustiest antiquarian interest'.16 The

12 See the second and third volumes for examples. Whether Skinner consistently practises what he
preaches is a debate in itself. Indeed, his approach to Machiavelli often seems to suggest that his
ideas can escape their context, in so far as they can be relevant to contemporary political and
philosophical concerns. See Visions, vol. ii, especially 'Machiavelli on virtü and the Maintenance
of Liberty' (ii. 160-85) and 'The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavelli and Modern Perspectives'
(ii. 186-212).
13 Skinner's success in inspiring scholars is clear. The success of the 'Ideas in Context' series he
edits for Cambridge University Press, which now contains over sixty titles, testifies to this.
14 James Tully's edited collection Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (1988)
[hereafter Tully, Meaning and Context], illustrates the diversity of this criticism, with essays from
Charles Taylor, Martin Hollis, John Keane, and Joseph Femia.
15 Skinner, 'Introduction' in Visions, i. 5.
16 Ibid., p. 6.

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428 QUENTIN SKINNER'S HISTORY OF IDEAS

question that many critics posed was simple: why bother reading Plato,
Machiavelli or Marx, unless they have something to say to us? For many
historians, such a criticism would perhaps be of little importance, but in
the case of Skinner, it seems to have touched a nerve. Though clearly
troubled by what he regards as a 'deeply philistine objection',17 it was
perhaps difficult to see exactly what effective response he could make
without compromising his original stance. Prior to the publication of
Visions, something of a critical impasse had been reached - the effect
being that historians of ideas were either with Skinner or against him.18
Critics risked charges that they were blind to the truth of historicism,
whilst acolytes risked being accused of participating in an activity that
was, by definition, irrelevant to modern concerns.
Whilst Visions offers the most coherent statement of Skinner's
methodology and of the anachronistic alternatives that he rejects, it also
represents an attempt to answer the above objection of irrelevance. This
attempt links to one of the most curious developments in Skinner's
thought, his increasing alliance with a fashionable epistemological and
moral scepticism. The foundation for this alliance is his assertion that 'we
live in post-modern times'.19 Indeed, this flirtation with post-modernism
plays a pivotal role throughout Visions, though the exact meaning of the
term is never adequately defined.20 At no point does Skinner elaborate on
what it might mean to live in 'post-modern times', and if he is referring
to an actual historical period, he does not make any claim for when it
commenced. Despite its nebulous character, the term 'post-modern' has
a clear significance for Skinner for three interrelated reasons. First, it
allows him to advance a critique of objectivity, which provides support
for his theory of 'particular' contexts and rejection of universals.
Secondly, it fits with his contention that language is the most important
area of historical analysis. Thirdly, it enables him to tie his method to the
increasingly prominent view of language as the most important locus of
social power and individual agency, making his work of 'political'

17 Ibid.
18 These concerns are brought out in R. Wokler, 'The Professoriate of Political Thought in Eng
land since 1914: A Tale of Three Chairs' and I. Hampsher-Monk, 'The History of Political Thought
and the Political History of Thought', The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed.
D. Castiglione and I. Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 134-58, 159-74.
19 Skinner, 'Motives, Intentions and Interpretation', Visions, i. 90.
20 The term 'post-modern' is itself notoriously vague, on account of it being the shorthand for the
work of a large number of theorists. The version of post-modernism that I consider Skinner to be
referring to is that outlined by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge,
1989) and Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, 1991). Both scholars
seem committed to the same type of scepticism towards the aims of morality and philosophy and
stress the fragmentary nature of history. Both also stress the political nature of language and both
claim to owe a major intellectual debt to Nietzsche (see n. 25), through which they advance their
critiques of liberal humanism and Marxism. Perhaps most crucially, neither sees a problem in
speaking of 'post-modern times'. When I refer to 'post-modernism', I will be referring to this very
loose version, one not to be confused with post-structuralism, and not to be associated with writers
such as Foucault or Gilles Deleuze.

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 ROBERT LAMB 429

importance and allowing him to make comparisons between his project

and the work of Michel Foucault.21
The rejection of the possibility of objective knowledge is crucial to
Skinner in Visions and informs a number of his other arguments. The
nature of his scepticism is twofold. First, he uses post-modernism to
offer a withering critique of the empiricist tradition of British history
associated with G. R. Elton - specifically, its suspicion of theory and
its devotion to 'the cult of the fact'.22 It is certainly no secret that the
empiricist vision of the historian as the neutral, scientific, collator of
'facts' has fallen into disrepute of late and Skinner is keen to add his
voice to the crowd. He thus expresses concern that 'despite the inroads of
post-modernist culture, this [empiricist] characterisation continues to
hold good for many practitioners'.23 This epistemological scepticism
lends support to Skinner's critique of abstract, objective textual analysis.
As 'it will never be possible simply to study what any writer has said. . .
without bringing to bear our own expectations and pre-judgments about
what they must be saying',24 the historian must endeavour to reconstruct
historical context and treat texts on their own terms.
Post-modernism also provides support for Skinner's moral scepticism,
which rather than merely complementing his fragmented, particular view
of history, seems actually to be a prerequisite of it. Skinner is openly
dismissive of any attempt to 'fix' normative language, and by extension,
rejects the possibility of any past attempt to do so.25 There is not and
cannot be, he claims, any stable 'language of morals', nor should we seek
one. Indeed, our ethical concepts should be regarded 'less as statements
about the world than as tools and weapons of ideological debate'.26
Rather than making the weaker claim that the historian should avoid
moral judgements, Skinner is suggesting that such judgements are
actually impossible because they are inevitably groundless.27 Whilst
epistemological scepticism acts as a buttress for his critique of extracting

21 Skinner cites Foucault on several occasions in Visions, for the most part in quite reverent terms
(see i. 19, 90, 119, 177). He has elsewhere suggested that were he advising students aspiring to be
intellectual historians, he would tell them to begin by reading Foucault, Clifford Geertz, or Pocock.
See The New History, p. 238. Skinner's recent affinity with the work of Foucault can perhaps be
traced to the comparison drawn between the two scholars by James Tully. See Tully, 'The Pen is a
Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner's Analysis of Politics' in Tully, Meaning and Context, pp. 1-25.
22 Skinner, 'The Practice of History and the Cult of the Fact', Visions, i. 8-26. As Skinner
acknowledges, the phrase was originally Liam Hudson's. See also Skinner's Liberty before Liberalism
(Cambridge, 1997).
23 Skinner, 'The Practice of History and the Cult of the Fact', Visions, i. 8.
24 Skinner, 'Meaning and Understanding', Visions, i. 58.
25 Skinner thus declares his 'allegiance to one particular tradition of twentieth century political
thought', one that 'may be perhaps be said to stem from Nietzsche' ('Retrospect: Studying Rhetorical
and Conceptual Change', Visions, i. 176).
26 Ibid., i. 177.
27 Skinner criticizes contemporary moral philosophy on the grounds that it is necessarily misfiring
through abstraction, attempting neutrality by 'standing above the battle': 'What the historical
record suggests is that no one is above the battle because the battle is all there is' ('Introduction',
Visions, i. 7. See also 'Retrospect', ibid., i. 177, 182).

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430 QUENTIN SKINNER'S HISTORY OF IDEAS

an objective meaning through textual analysis, this moral scepticism gives

Skinner's project a political kudos it previously lacked, and responds to
those critics who suggested that his project amounted to nothing but a
'conducted tour of a graveyard'.28 His claim is that by learning from the
past, we can learn the contingency of our own values, and further, that
realizing this truth of relativism is important.29 Post-modernism therefore
ostensibly gives Skinner's approach the social purpose of which it was
previously accused of being bereft.
What Skinner's work and post-modernism shared was an emphasis on
the importance of language. Visions represents an attempt to cement this
link and, in addition, to tie Skinner's conception of the particularity of
history to post-modern conceptions of power and agency. Skinner
stresses the political nature of language in two ways. First, he regards
language as inevitably ideological. Thus, one of the main functions of a
language is to provide legitimacy and justification for moral claims -
claims that can only be bogus. Skinner acknowledges that he is generaliz
ing the thesis outlined by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism - that a group of individuals, in this case mercantilists
in early modern Europe, needed to legitimize their behaviour through
recourse to an ideological, moralizing discourse. The conclusion that
Skinner draws is that individuals rarely believe in their 'professed
principles' and that all moralizing discourse is inescapably ideological.
This requires that the historian does not accept such principles at face
value and searches instead for the underlying ideology that the individual
in question is seeking to justify.30 Ultimately, 'it is in large part by the
rhetorical manipulation of [evaluative and descriptive] terms that any
society succeeds in establishing, upholding, questioning or altering its
moral identity'.31
Secondly, because of this role performed by language in legitimizing
individual moral claims, its deployment is one of the most important
sites of social power and therefore of individual agency. For Skinner,
although language is a constraint, which 'shapes us all', it 'is also a
resource, and we can use it to shape our world'.32 He does not attempt to
account for this theory of agency, assuming its appeal to be self-evident.
It can be viewed, however, as consistent with his association with post
modernism. One of the most commonplace commitments of post
modernism has been to a post-Marxist and post-structuralist notion of
power, one that rejects both economic and linguistic determinism, and
is wary of locating individual agency in any fixed social force. Post
modernists tend to view power as constantly in flux, and hold that

28 Skinner, 'Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts'. Visions, i. 125.

29 Skinner claims that such learning is 'one of the keys to self-awareness itself' ( Visions, i. 89).
Unsurprisingly, Skinner has been labelled a relativist, something he seems to accept, although he
does quibble over the consequences of adopting such a position. See Visions, i. 51-6, 126-7.
30 Skinner, 'Moral Principles and Social Change', Visions, i. 145-57.
31 Ibid., i. 149.
32 Skinner, 'Introduction', Visions, i. 7.

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 ROBERT LAMB 431

resistance to power is (potentially) contingent upon mere access to the

medium through which power relations are negotiated. It is Skinner's
contention that moral argument and the use of rhetoric represent the
most important example of such a medium. As a corollary to this,
individuals are able to exert agency in a way previously thought to be
inconsistent with the vision of language as a structural constraint. In
other words, by identifying his theory with post-modernism, Skinner can
afford to be elusive about how an individual is actually able to perform
a 'speech-act' that is genuinely innovative. Also, by making language
inevitably ideological, he is placing historians at a key site of resistance,
giving his own work political credentials. This is because, by studying
past ideas, historians 'can help liberate us from the grip of any one
hegemonal account of [social] values and how they should be interpreted
and understood'.33
Skinner's embrace of post-modernism inevitably raises some difficulties
for his project. Although he relies on scepticism to make the case for the
inescapable particularity of contexts and at the same time seeks to align
himself with post-modern theories of power, he cannot accept all that
comes with this movement. Thus, he notes with some concern that part
of 'post-modern culture has been a deepened scepticism about the tradi
tional humanist project of interpreting texts'.34 How, then, can Skinner
make the case for a particular theory of historical meaning above all
others, when he is increasingly lauding an academic movement committed
to rejecting the whole idea of textual meaning?
Skinner clearly has much to do to bridge the gap between embracing
post-modernism and rejecting the idea that historical texts have hetero
geneous or 'open' meanings. He is aware of this and attempts to offer a
defensive response in one crucial chapter. This response, however, shies
away from real critical engagement with those he purports to disagree
with. Thus, whilst Skinner tentatively suggests that the hermeneutics
favoured by Paul Ricoeur and Stanley Fish do not render the task of
recovering intentions redundant, he does not provide any real reasons
why this should be the case.35 Instead, he relies on the pluralistic notion
that the historian and literary critic are engaging in separate scholarly
activities and there is more than a single meaning to be found when
approaching a text. This pluralism may seem quite sensible, but it rather
jars with his previous insistence that philosophers cannot legitimately
use historical texts for their own purposes. If an abstract philosophical
interpretation must be ruled out because of the nature of contextual
constraints, this would seem to require all interpretations to be historical
and contextual. It is thus perplexing that Skinner does not attempt any
substantial refutation of the 'reader-response' approaches to meaning,
advanced by Ricoeur and Fish.

33 Ibid., i. 6.
34 Skinner, 'Motives, Intentions and Interpretation', ibid., i. 90.
35 Ibid., i. 90-102.

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432 QUENTIN SKINNER'S HISTORY OF IDEAS

Skinner claims that Jacques Derrida presents the most serious post
modern challenge to the location of meaning by rejecting the 'very idea
of textual interpretation',36 on the grounds that it necessarily relies on a
'metaphysics of presence'. However, after introducing this argument as
the greatest threat to the idea of interpretation, Skinner then opts not to
address it, on the grounds that Derrida is referring to 'meaning' in a
general sense and not intentionality. This claim does not really address
what is at issue in Derrida's critique of logocentrism, which seems to be
aimed at all attempts to establish a true, final location of meaning and
thus impinges on the historicist project as much as any other.37 This is
not to suggest that Derrida is correct in his diagnosis, merely that Skinner
does not show that he is wrong, and thus cannot claim to have solved the
problem of courting post-modernism whilst seeking to privilege his own
theory of interpretation.
Finally, when considering the 'death of the author', trumpeted by
Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, Skinner claims to regard all such
reports as 'greatly exaggerated'.38 Though this may be a good joke, it is
an inadequate response to an undeniably influential concept, central to
post-modernism as an academic movement. As with all historians of
ideas, Skinner works on the assumption that the 'author' is an appropriate
category of analysis. If this category were dispensed with, there would be
no point in tracing the development of a philosopher's views on a particu
lar issue, as Skinner attempts to do with the concept of rhetoric in the
writings of Hobbes.39 Yet Skinner seems reluctant to defend the idea of
the author, making it difficult to know exactly what his theoretical stance
is, and what - apart from a commitment to scepticism - makes him a
post-modernist.
Skinner's inability to counter what he describes as the post-modern
case against textual interpretation is telling and shows that he cannot
bridge the gap between embracing post-modernism on the one hand,
and positing a strict method which holds out the hope of determining
meaning on the other. This contradiction makes it difficult to take his
'post-modern' history of ideas as seriously as he thinks we should.
Skinner's embrace of post-modernism emerges as less than whole
hearted, and his major intellectual debt remains to R. G. Collingwood,40
who famously argued for the obliteration of any distinction between
philosophy and history, with only history remaining. Collingwood's views
support Skinner's moral scepticism, his insistence on the particularity
of historical contexts and his emphasis on the importance of language.

36 Ibid.. i. 91.
37 Derrida's critique of logocentrism - in many ways an extension or reformulation of Heidegger's
critique of identity - is given its most detailed account in Writing and Difference (1978) and Of
Grammatology (1976).
38 Skinner, 'Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts', Visions, i. 117.
39 See in particular, 'Hobbes' Changing Conception of Civil Science', ibid., iii. 66-86.
40 Skinner has always acknowledged his debt to Collingwood, and this is no less explicit in volume
i of Visions. See especially pp. 83-9.

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 ROBERT LAMB 433

What Collingwood's work does not give Skinner, as critics have been
quick to notice, is a sense of social and political purpose, and it seems to
be for this reason that he has turned to post-modernism.
It seems important, somewhat ironically, to place Skinner's work into
its academic context in order to assess its doctrinal coherence and its
utility for historians and to search for his intentions when examining its
recent developments. As described above, Skinner's critical intervention
has been a necessary one, if only to purge the history of ideas of its
tendency towards inaccuracies and anachronisms. Moreover, his use of
'speech-act' theory remains an innovative and valuable guide to historical
practice, and one of the most reliable methods of gleaning authorial
intentions. However, whilst Visions of Politics demonstrates this emphat
ically, the embrace of post-modernism has the effect of undermining his
thesis as a whole, so much so that the question of Skinner's own intentions
arises. The post-modern vision of history to which Skinner has fastened
his method emerged to supplant both empiricist and Marxist theory in
the last twenty years. Its notable features - to which Skinner subscribes
- are a rejection of objectivity and a privileging of language and rhetoric,
both as an area of academic enquiry, and as the essential locus of social
power. It is perhaps unsurprising that Skinner has sought to align
himself with this academic movement, which lends his work a more
fashionable, political appearance. However, although he can pour scorn
over traditional notions such as objectivity, he is left without the philo
sophical resources to defend (or at least privilege) his own theory of
meaning. This is something underlined by his reluctance to engage
critically with those associated with post-modernism's radical critique of
'true' textual interpretation. Ultimately, Skinner is unable to demonstrate
how one can so passionately reject the idea of truth, and yet be so insistent
about historical method and accuracy.

) 2004 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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