![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Intellectual history is usually seen as essentially historical. It is – but it is also essentially philosophical, both when theorising intellectual history, which some intellectual historians do, and when interpreting texts, which all intellectual historians do. I demonstrate this symbiosis between history and philosophy via critical reflections on Martin Jay’s recent book Genesis and Validity. Philosophical analysis, closely integrated with historical examples, suggests that we should significantly rethink Jay’s theorisation of the relationship between genesis and validity (e.g. whether ideas from one context are valid in others). But the symbiosis between history and philosophy matters more when interpreting texts. Philosophical analysis is a powerful tool for recovering what authors meant, understanding how their ideas fit together, and seeing similarities and differences between ideas, as I show with examples from Quentin Skinner’s interpretations of Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. Yet even Jay and Skinner – two of the world’s most philosophically astute intellectual historians – overlook the crucial symbiosis between history and philosophy.
Acknowledgements
I thank my anonymous reviewers and Cesare Cuttica, Kajo Kubela and Walter Rech for comments and criticisms on a previous version of this article. This article was written at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, whose support and community I gratefully acknowledge.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Valentina Arena, Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
2 Thomas Nash, ‘Introduction’, in Lichen Biology, ed. Thomas Nash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–3.
3 Adrian Blau, ‘Philosophical Analysis’, in Research Handbook on the History of Political Thought, ed. Cary Nederman and Guillaume Bogiaris (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, forthcoming).
4 On this (dubious) distinction, see Adrian Blau, ‘Introduction: A “How-To” Approach’, in Methods in Analytical Political Theory, ed. Adrian Blau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6–7.
5 This way of understanding philosophy is taken from Adrian Blau, ‘Meanings and Understandings in the History of Ideas’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 14, no. 2 (2020): 244. On the philosophy/history distinction, see Adrian Blau, ‘Textual Context in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History’, History of European Ideas 45, no. 8 (2019): 1195–6.
6 For variations across Europe, see Brian Young, ‘Intellectual History and Historismus in Post-War England’, in A Companion to Intellectual History, ed. Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 20.
7 See e.g. Philosophy and its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Mogens Lærke, Justin Smith and Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially the chapters by Mogens Lærke, Ursula Goldenbaum, Julie Klein, Michael Della Rocca, and Eric Schliesser.
8 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 48–53.
9 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98–107, 111–22.
10 Stefan Collini, ‘The Identity of Intellectual History’, in A Companion to Intellectual History, ed. Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 13.
11 John Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy 43, no. 164 (1968): especially 86, 99.
12 Dunn, ‘Identity’, 88–91.
13 Dunn, ‘Identity’, 92, in the passage from ‘What is much less clear’ to ‘temporally inviolate entity’.
14 Dunn, ‘Identity’, 95–6.
15 Ibid., 99.
16 A.P. Martinich, ‘Philosophical History of Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41 no. 3 (2003): 406.
17 Martin Jay, Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
18 Ibid., 74.
19 Ibid, 1.
20 Ibid., 3, 219–21.
21 Ibid., 1.
22 Ibid., 5.
23 Robert Goodin, ‘How to Write Analytical Political Theory’, in Methods in Analytical Political Theory, ed. Adrian Blau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 18.
24 E.g. Derek Parfit, ‘Equality or Priority?’, in The Ideal of Equality, ed. Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
25 For this list, three-quarters of which comes from David Miller, see Adrian Blau, ‘Against Positive and Negative Freedom’, Political Theory 32, no. 4 (2004): 548. I have changed ‘doing what one does want’ to ‘doing what one could want’. I thank Johannes Stroebel for correcting me.
26 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 130–3, 124–39.
27 E.g. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’.
28 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 219–20.
29 Ibid., 9–10, 39, 98–9.
30 One exception is Ibid., 52–3.
31 Adrian Blau, ‘How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?’, The Review of Politics 83, no. 1 (2021): 96–8; Adrian Blau, ‘How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes’, American Journal of Political Science 65 no. 2 (2021): 366; and Adrian Blau, ‘Why Do So Many Scholars Try and Fail to Draw Contemporary Insights from the History of Political Thought?’, Scienza & Politica 35, no. 68 (2023): 274.
32 Most importantly, see Adrian Blau, ‘Extended Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019): 342–59; Blau, ‘Textual Context’, 1195–9, 1206–7; and Blau, ‘How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?’, 108–14. See too Adrian Blau, ‘History of Political Thought as Detective-Work’, History of European Ideas 41 no. 8 (2015): 1191; Adrian Blau, ‘Interpreting Texts’, in Methods in Analytical Political Theory ed. Adrian Blau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Adrian Blau, ‘Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes: Historical and Philosophical’, in Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Thought, ed. S.A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Blau, ‘How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes’; and Blau, ‘Why Do So Many Scholars Try and Fail to Draw Contemporary Insights?’.
33 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 1.
34 Ibid., 96.
35 Ibid., 6–7, 30.
36 Ibid., 5–8, 23, 58, 174–92, 230.
37 Ibid., 2, 10–12, 124–54.
38 Ibid., 206.
39 Robert Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently – and Why (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2003), chapter 1.
40 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 25. Emphasis added.
41 Compare e.g. Ibid., 1–5 with 26–7.
42 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 1, 38, 177.
43 Ibid., 37–8.
44 Ibid., 1.
45 Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 200–1.
46 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 7.
47 Ibid., 1–5; see also 29–30 on Hegel.
48 Ibid., 6.
49 Ibid., 26.
50 Ibid., 26.
51 Ibid., 1. Emphasis added.
52 See especially Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–20; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
53 Himani Bhakuni, ‘Reproductive Justice: Non-Interference or Non-Domination’, Developing World Bioethics 23 no. 2 (2023).
54 See Blau, ‘How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?’, 95–9.
55 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 34–5; quotation at 35.
56 Ibid., 50.
57 Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume I, 103–7.
58 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 35–40.
59 Ibid., 48, 230–1.
60 Ibid., 8, 21, 104.
61 Ibid., 51; see e.g. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 116–20.
62 See, similarly, Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
63 Blau, ‘Interpreting Texts’, 251.
64 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, in Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 19.
65 Adrian Blau, ‘Hobbes on Corruption’, History of Political Thought 30, no. 4 (2009): 599–60.
66 Quentin Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of Liberty’, University of California, Berkeley, 15 September 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECiVz_zRj7A, at 18 minutes 10 seconds.
67 Ibid., at c. 18 minutes 25 seconds, and PowerPoint slides around this point.
68 Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume 1, 48.
69 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 35.
70 Blau, ‘Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes’, 13.
71 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 110–12.
72 Blau, ‘Interpreting Texts’, 252–6; Blau, ‘Extended Meaning’, 352–8; Blau, ‘Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes’; Blau, ‘Textual Context’, 1196–8 and passim.
73 Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume I, 121–2; Adrian Blau, ‘Uncertainty and the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 50, no. 3 (2011).
74 Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of Liberty’. The distinctions I discuss are not included in the only published part of Skinner’s genealogy of liberty: Quentin Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002).
75 Ibid.
76 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 51.
77 Blau, ‘Interpreting Texts’, 251–7; see also Blau, ‘How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?’, 96–9.
78 Jay, Genesis and Validity, 51.
79 Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39–44.
80 E.g. Robert Black, Machiavelli (London: Routledge, 2013), 103–12.
81 On this last point, see Russell Price, ‘The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli’, Renaissance Quarterly 30 no. 4 (1977): 607–8.
82 Blau, ‘Philosophical Analysis’.
83 Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes’s “Leviathan”’, The Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (1964): 333.