Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The context of The Foundations

Quentin Skinner's early work was devoted as much to questions of method as to substantive historical exposition. Indeed, he became known to far wider audiences through his methodological essays than through those in his first field of research, the political thought of the English Revolution. His most cited article, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, published in 1969, was strikingly polemical in the anathemas it pronounced upon the practices of his colleagues. Accordingly, when The Foundations of Modern Political Thought appeared in 1978, its reviewers were as much concerned to assess the book in relation to its author's methodological injunctions as to judge its contribution to its historical topic. Foundations was, among much else, a heroic hostage to fortune, and there was no little Schadenfreude among those reviewers who claimed it had failed its author's own tests. In this essay I revisit some aspects of Skinner's approach to intellectual history, taking note of early reactions to Foundations . My aims are threefold. First, I explore some of the impediments, within the historical profession in the 1960s, which Skinner believed stood in the way of the study of intellectual history. Second, I consider a specific criticism of Foundations , that itwas overly committed to a teleological account of the emergence of the modern theory of the sovereign state. Third, interwoven throughout, I stress the extent to which Skinner's work was indebted to the German social theorist Max Weber. In this discussion it should be kept in mind that a principal context for Foundations lay in the practice of history in Britain in the 1960s, for the book's origins lay in lectures which Skinner first delivered in Cambridge in 1965.