Without Laslett to the lost worlds: Quentin Skinner's early methodology

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to suggest that the emergence of the so-called Cambridge School of history of political thought can best be understood in terms of two competing visions of the relationship between history and social science, focusing on Peter Laslett and Quentin Skinner. Although Laslett is often distinguished as a founder of the Cambridge School, this paper suggests an alternative view by emphasizing the theoretical discontinuity between Laslett and Skinner rather than their continuity. Laslett, a practitioner of Karl Manheim's ideas, promoted the idea of a comprehensive scientific social history, within which intellectual history was located. This paper argues that Skinner broke with Laslett's idea. For Skinner, (1) Laslett was a positivist who applied the natural scientific model to intellectual history; (2) Laslett's positivism was actually ‘contextualism’; and (3) the alternative to Laslett's contextualism was the history of ideology. Skinner's early methodology was, in part, a rhetorical redescription of ‘ideology’, which opposed both Mannheim and Laslett. As such, this paper focuses on the discursive disconnection between Laslett and Skinner, thus providing a clue to construct a platform for facilitating a further discussion of the history of ideas and the social sciences.