Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas and Beyond

Abstract

This is the first book-length analysis of Quentin Skinner’s seminal essay ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’. Skinner’s essay is one of the most influential historical articles ever published, written by one of the world’s most prominent scholars in intellectual history and a leading figure in the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ of the history of political thought. Skinner’s essay defended a strongly historical approach to interpreting historical texts: without an appropriately historical mentality and historical method, Skinner argued, the result is mythology, not history. Skinner’s contextualism has always been controversial, but many previous commentators have caricatured his position. The authors in this volume seek to be fair to Skinner, while disagreeing with him to greater or lesser extents. Chapters in this interdisciplinary collection cover many issues, including: the previously unknown first draft of Skinner’s essay; Skinner’s theoretical and philosophical foundations; how well his ideas stand up in Islamic, ancient Greek, and Indian contexts; ideology, rhetoric and language; and what Skinner’s historical method could look like in the age of digital humanities and computational text analysis. The book concludes with Skinner’s response to his commentators and critics.