Intellectual history as a symbiosis between history and philosophy: critical reflections on Martin Jay

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Cambridge School
• contextualism
• hermeneutics
• history of political thought
• John Dunn
• Quentin Skinner

1. Introduction

Philosophy is not just done by philosophers. Intellectual historians and historians of political thought always think philosophically, when theorising intellectual history and when interpreting texts. (Henceforth, I talk only of intellectual history, but my arguments apply also to history of political thought.)

Quentin Skinner’s work clearly demonstrates the symbiosis of history and philosophy. His theorising of intellectual history is famously philosophical. Much less discussed is his philosophical analysis of authors like Machiavelli and Hobbes. Yet Skinner is hardly alone here: other intellectual historians with philosophically acute textual interpretations, in various ways, include Valentina Arena, Annabel Brett, Knud Haakonssen, Noel Malcolm, Helena Rosenblatt and Richard Tuck.¹

Intellectual history is not just history with a bit of philosophy. My paper’s central argument is that the history/philosophy relationship is symbiotic, both when theorising intellectual history (which some intellectual historians do), and in textual interpretation (which all intellectual historians do). Symbiosis, which has different meanings, refers here to the combination of components which benefits each component and creates something new. For example, lichens have two components, fungal and photosynthetic (usually an alga); but the lichen looks and behaves differently to its constituent parts.²

It should be obvious why theorising intellectual history is a symbiosis between history and philosophy: it involves philosophising about intellectual history. But making the symbiosis explicit has two advantages. First, it highlights the importance of being analytical – of making distinctions, breaking down arguments, and so on. Second, it highlights the importance of examples, and crucially, of linking the examples to analytical distinctions and decompositions just mentioned. Much theorising of intellectual history is too abstract: better use of historical examples creates a stronger symbiosis between history and philosophy, I will argue.

It is less obvious why textual interpretation is a symbiosis between history and philosophy. But interpretation is always partly philosophical: we must think philosophically to recover meanings, see how ideas connect, and so on. To take an example I expand on later, we have not understood Machiavelli’s Prince very well if we do not see how virtù relates to fortuna. Philosophers may go much further than historians in reconstructing an author’s system of ideas, but every textual interpreter does it a bit. Making the symbiosis explicit gives us valuable tools for interpreting texts.

I must stress a crucial point: philosophy may be necessary to intellectual history, but historical analysis is often much more important. Readers should not worry that I am trying to replace intellectual history with history of philosophy. Intellectual history tends to ask primarily empirical questions, while history of philosophy tends to ask primarily theoretical questions. But importantly, we answer these questions with some of the same tools. It is thus a mistake to see philosophical analysis as something which only philosophers do.³

Nor should readers worry that I am recommending high-powered, complicated philosophical analysis. True, sophisticated philosophising will sometimes help, especially for more philosophical authors such as Hobbes or Locke. But the ‘philosophical’ analysis I discuss is sometimes so obvious that our brains already do it without us noticing. Indeed, to claim that theorising and practising intellectual history is inherently a symbiosis of history and philosophy is to accept that intellectual historians already do philosophical analysis. My point is that sometimes they could it with a bit more sophistication.

I am not claiming that all intellectual history involves philosophical analysis, or that no other kinds of history do. Consider an intellectual historian analysing a 17th-century library’s contents to see what texts an author could have accessed. This is history, not philosophy. Meanwhile, some mainstream history involves philosophical analysis, as when social historians interpret texts.

Three quick caveats. First, my idea of philosophy is broadly ‘Anglo-American’ or ‘analytical’, not ‘continental’.⁴ I treat ‘analytical’ very broadly: I am not thinking about extreme/formalistic kinds of analytical philosophy, but about the idea of philosophy as seeking clarity and hopefully right answers by testing logical/conceptual consequences, consistency and correctness.⁵ I leave it to those more expert in continental philosophy to assess the relationship between history and continental philosophy.

Second, my account of intellectual history too is broadly Anglophone. In mainland Europe, many intellectual historians work in philosophy departments; my story often looks different there.⁶

Third, just as intellectual historians should often take philosophy more seriously, so too many philosophers should take history more seriously. But the latter point has often been made, including by philosophers.⁷ The former point still needs more emphasis – my goal here.

I am certainly not the first to support closer connections between philosophy and history. Skinner seeks ‘a dialogue between philosophical discussion and historical evidence’, both in the sense that philosophers should not seek answers to supposedly perennial questions (since historical analysis will show that both the answers and even the questions mean different things in different contexts), and in the sense that historians interpreting texts can learn from philosophical distinctions in speech-act theory.⁸ But the latter point is about theorising intellectual history, whereas I also argue that historians interpreting texts can benefit from philosophical analysis of those texts. Skinner also argues that even those doing history of philosophy should use historical analysis.⁹ But again, he does not make the reverse case – that historical analysis also involves philosophical analysis.

Stefan Collini once made that case: intellectual historians should ‘read like a critic, analyse like a philosopher, explain like a historian’. He now thinks that this dictum ‘considerably exaggerates the extent to which anything approaching philosophical or conceptual analysis is necessarily a part of the work of the intellectual historian’.¹⁰ I prefer Collini’s original view.

John Dunn and Al Martinich, in different ways, are close to my position. Dunn advocates an ‘intimate’ connection between history and philosophy: doing both is ‘a necessary preliminary’ for ‘indefeasible’ explanations.¹¹ A ‘full’ rather than partial understanding requires both historical knowledge, e.g. why Plato wrote the Republic, and philosophical assessment, i.e. whether his theory was true or false.¹² Dunn’s terminology feels outmoded: few people would now talk of ‘indefeasible’ explanations, ‘full’ understandings, or normative arguments being ‘true or false’. Nonetheless, Dunn rightly implies something like the symbiosis I too describe. He offers three different arguments. I confess that I do not understand the first.¹³ The second is that we cannot even understand a philosophical argument without grasping why an author made certain claims without justifying them, or what the criteria of truth/falsehood were at the time.¹⁴ The third is that communicating ‘the meaning of Plato’s Republic’ requires ‘grasping the point of the original intellectual enterprise’.¹⁵ But even if both of these last two claims are right, they do not include important research in intellectual history, e.g. dating the Republic or asking who its intended audiences were. Yet I will argue that philosophical analysis is required here too, to the extent that such questions involve interpreting texts, even non-philosophical texts.

Al Martinich holds that the line between intellectual history and history of philosophy is ‘not sharp’. The difference involves ‘the degree of attention’ paid to philosophical questions, such as what an author’s premises are and whether the conclusion follow.¹⁶ By implication, then, at least some intellectual historians put at least some emphasis on philosophical questions. My paper expands on this view.

I discuss these issues while critically reflecting on Martin Jay’s recent book Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History.¹⁷ Jay is an astonishingly insightful and productive historian. This book, his sixteenth (!), is magnificent in its breadth and depth. Jay captures the excitement of intellectual history, showing how grasping the genesis of ideas and placing them in context may tell us more than simple philosophical reflection on the ideas themselves.¹⁸ It is astonishing how much Jay knows, and what connections he spots between different authors and fields. For me, reading this book was both a learning experience and a humbling experience.

I have chosen Jay not only because he is one of the world’s leading intellectual historians, but also because he is philosophically astute. He is knowledgeable and insightful about a wide range of philosophers in many branches: aesthetics, historiography, literary theory, philosophy of science, political theory, and more. Page after page shows this historian’s philosophical insightfulness.

Yet even a philosophically astute intellectual historian like Jay does not grasp the symbiosis of history and philosophy. Given the subtitle of Jay’s book – The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History – I discuss two aspects of the history-philosophy symbiosis in intellectual history: theory and practice. First, theorising intellectual history is inevitably philosophical. Yet Jay’s theorising of the terms in the book’s main title – Genesis and Validity – would benefit from being more philosophical. Section 2 of my paper offers distinctions which suggest a complete rethink of Jay’s account of the genesis/validity relationship. Genesis is largely irrelevant, for example, while significant changes are needed to Jay’s language of the ‘validity’ of ‘ideas and values’ which ‘transcend’ their ‘context’.

Crucially, Section 2 is not just philosophical: its philosophy is intimately historical. Jay’s theorising is often rather abstract, but my philosophical distinctions derive from actual historical examples. Again, this speaks to the history/philosophy symbiosis.

Section 3 turns from the theory of intellectual history to its practice. Interpreting historical texts inherently combines history and philosophy. We cannot understand what Machiavelli means by virtù without conceptual analysis, or without reconstructing some of Machiavelli’s system of ideas, e.g. seeing how virtù relates to fortuna. These are not optional extras: they are necessary to the very act of understanding Machiavelli. Other philosophical tools are also part and parcel of textual interpretation, as I show with examples from Skinner. Yet Jay’s book gives no hint of this, and to my knowledge, Skinner’s own methodological writings give only one hint of it, in an incidental sentence from 1964.

My paper is not really a critique of Jay. Jay’s book largely reflects orthodoxies in intellectual history, and these orthodoxies are my real target. But Jay’s book shows how even philosophically astute intellectual historians can overlook the symbiosis between history and philosophy. History and philosophy go hand in hand – even when history has the upper hand.

2. Theorising intellectual history: philosophical analysis and historical examples

Genesis and Validity is a set of essays dealing with the relationship between ‘the genesis of an idea or value in a specific context, and its claim to validity beyond it’.¹⁹ Many people discuss this issue, including the social theorist Hans Joas, the intellectual historian Peter Gordon, and the philosopher Theodor Adorno.²⁰

Jay sees the genesis/validity relationship as the most ‘contentious and perennial issue in the history of Western thought’.²¹ Perennial it may be, but contentious it is not. Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Muslims accept some ancient ideas, as Jay notes later.²² Even non-religious people typically still see value in ‘do not kill’ and ‘do as you would be done by’.

I will illustrate two aspects of the symbiosis between history and philosophy when theorising intellectual history: the use of analysis, which is essentially philosophical, and the use of examples, which is usually historical. I briefly expand on both aspects before applying them to genesis and validity.

As regards analysis, I have been much influenced by Bob Goodin’s dictum: ‘Distinctions = arguments’.²³ That formula cannot be quite right: distinction is often the basis for argument rather than the argument itself. For example, philosophers may distinguish different aspects of equality before using this for a normative argument.²⁴ But Goodin’s essential insight is correct: we often benefit when we see that what we thought of as one thing is actually two or more things, and that our answers depend on which of these things we examine.

For example, we cannot assess freedom’s value without distinguishing different kinds of freedom. I do not just mean positive freedom, negative freedom and republican freedom. Neither Isaiah Berlin nor many of his commentators appear to have spotted that Berlin’s ‘positive freedom’ actually covers at least four different things: a positive power or capacity, in contrast to mere lack of constraint; rational self-control, in contrast to being driven by desires; collective self-control, in contrast to being controlled by others; and doing what one should want, in contrast to doing what one could want.²⁵

Philosophical hair-splitting can be tedious and pointless, but a sensible balance allows for better arguments. Recognising that Berlin’s ‘positive’ freedom is actually four different things undermines his critique of positive freedom, since not all point as strongly to authoritarianism as Berlin suggests. The same point could be made historically, of course: almost every political thinker of any complexity upholds some negative and some positive idea of freedom, including many thinkers who were not authoritarian. I am not arguing that philosophy should replace history – far from it.

Jay’s book does offer analytical distinctions, e.g. different components of lies, in his fascinating discussion of whether photographs can lie.²⁶ But I will shortly argue that his account of genesis and validity would also benefit from more analytical distinctions. First, though, I will briefly consider the power of examples and their place in the history-philosophy symbiosis.

Examples help both readers and writers. Many readers need examples to understand abstract points. I definitely do. I may emphasise the value of philosophical analysis, but I regularly struggle with abstract writing, and usually need examples to understand it.

The clarity of Skinner’s methodological writings partly reflects his examples.²⁷ Jay’s book sometimes gives excellent examples, as with the fascinating case of Japanese challenges to Western aesthetic principles in the late 19th century. These challenges reflected not just different ideas of beauty but differences in how aesthetics itself was seen – ‘the differentiation of “art” from other spheres of life and the elevation of certain formal qualities into allegedly universal principles’.²⁸ This is a telling example of how aesthetic values and principles may not travel across contexts.

However, often Jay is too abstract. I wonder how many non-experts will grasp the abstract points that he makes about Rainer Forst, about Skinner’s monological rather than dialogical approach, or Reinhard Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte, say.²⁹

Unfortunately, when Jay gives examples, they are often examples of scholarship, rather than from history itself.³⁰ Giving examples from scholarship matters, of course. Without examples, we can easily caricature our opponents, as in John Pocock’s misrepresentation of philosophy and political theory, and Dunn’s overstatements about the deficiencies of ‘twentieth-century philosophy’ and ‘the modern social sciences’.³¹ But when theorising intellectual history, historical examples are particularly useful.

Examples may help not only readers but writers. My analytical distinctions below actually derived from thinking about historical examples. Indeed, when I started writing this article, I intended to argue merely that historians can benefit by thinking philosophically, or even that they must sometimes think philosophically, as I have argued before.³² But the examples below led me to the stronger position: history and philosophy are symbiotic.

I thus combine these two methodological principles – making analytical distinctions, driven by examples from historical texts – to rethink Jay’s account of the genesis/validity relationship.

2.1. What are we focusing on – ideas, values, or more?

Jay starts by talking about whether ‘an idea or value’ can have validity beyond the context of its genesis.³³ However, as he notes later, ‘idea’ has many meanings – at least 25, according to George Boas.³⁴ For example, ‘idea’ could refer to a concept (rationality), an empirical hypothesis (women are more rational than men), a theory (rational choice theory), and so on.

Jay also talks about whether contexts can be transcended by linguistic meanings,³⁵ scientific propositions,³⁶ and aesthetic values.³⁷ He even notes that context affects the legitimacy of speech: shouting fire in a crowded theatre is unjustified unless there is actual smoke and flames.³⁸ Further distinctions could be made. For normative issues, we could distinguish between an evaluation (e.g. whether shouting fire in a crowded theatre is legitimate), a value (e.g. liberty), a principle (e.g. the harm principle), and a normative system (e.g. utilitarianism). I suspect that the above four sub-categories could apply to aesthetic issues too. We could even ask if the rules of logic are universally valid, or are more relevant for some cultures than others.³⁹

So, Jay’s ‘ideas and values’ seem to include some very different things:

• empirical propositions – descriptive and explanatory;

• logical propositions;

• meanings;

• concepts;

• distinctions;

• aesthetic issues: evaluations, values, principles, and aesthetic systems; and

• normative issues: evaluations, values, principles, and normative systems.

For ease of exposition, I will usually continue to talk about ‘ideas and values’, or sometimes ‘ideas’ or even ‘things’, as the longer list is too cumbersome. But the diversity of the longer list is worth remembering, as I now explain.

2.2. How does our focus affect the genesis/validity relationship?

The above list is so different that the relationship between genesis and validity may differ for different items. It is much easier for a description such as ‘Mount Everest is taller than me’ to be acceptable in different contexts than a normative principle such as ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. (This is not to deny the language-laden nature of ‘empirical’ propositions: they are always conceptual and not just descriptions of ‘reality’.) Likewise, it is easier to accept the value of equity – the principle of ‘like cases alike, unalike cases relevantly unalike’ – than to accept Hobbes’s thirteenth law of nature (equity demands that ownership of things in nature should be decided by lot when they cannot be divided or enjoyed in common). And it is far easier to accept either of those things than Hobbes’s entire normative system.

In short, there is probably no such thing as ‘the’ relationship between genesis and validity. No one should want to ‘come down firmly on the side of either genetic contextualism or transcendent validity’.⁴⁰ I take it that Jay is not here describing his own position; indeed, he later recognises that the issue is more complex than the false dichotomy with which he repeatedly introduces the debate.⁴¹ But the issue is considerably more complex than even Jay suggests, as I now argue.

2.3. What is ‘genesis’?

Jay talks as if ideas and values have a clear genesis. This is not always so. Does egotistical instrumental rationality have its genesis in Hobbes, Mandeville, Bentham or later economists? Does the modern idea of the state have its genesis with Machiavelli or Hobbes? Does the labour theory of value have its genesis in Locke or Marx? Meanwhile, many ideas are so old that recovering their genesis is probably impossible (e.g. morality, corruption, god). But we need not worry further about this issue: the next question renders genesis largely irrelevant.

2.4. Is genesis even relevant?

When discussing whether something is applicable in other contexts, why does it matter whether the thing being applied had its genesis in the first context or not? If we seek insights from Machiavelli’s defence of broad-based (largo) popular republics over narrow-based (stretto) elitist republics, it does not matter whether Machiavelli was the first person to have the idea of a largo republic (which he was not), or the first person to defend largo republics in particular ways (which he was). When contemporary neo-Kantians apply Kant’s ideas, it does not matter whether the ideas were invented by Kant or had their genesis in Rousseau. Some of Hobbes’s laws of nature were longstanding commonplaces. The genesis of such ideas is irrelevant.

True, sometimes genesis does influence applicability. Some democrats see laws or norms as legitimate only if they are produced by fair procedures, e.g. inclusive, open-minded deliberation; they cannot simply be transported into new contexts. Conservatives may prefer norms to evolve gradually, which again restricts applicability in new contexts. But such cases are probably rare. Genesis is usually a non-starter.

Often, applicability works backwards, e.g. when assessing a historical author’s alleged racism or sexism. The question is not whether we can apply the author’s values today, as with Machiavelli’s republicanism, but whether we can apply our values to earlier authors, e.g. calling Machiavelli a sexist. Genesis is irrelevant here too: it matters little if Machiavelli was the first to make misogynistic comments or not, or whether our ideas of sexism had their genesis in our context or not. The question is whether it is anachronistic or unfair to apply our standards to Machiavelli.

2.5. What is a ‘context’?

We usually talk as if contexts have clear limits. But as Jay recognises, that is not quite right. His initial account mentions ‘discrete contexts, however they are defined’, and he notes the difficulty of determining what the right context is, using the excellent example of Freud’s multiple contexts – his educational and religious backgrounds, his family and political relationships, and so on. Jay ultimately accepts that strictly speaking a single ‘context’ would be all-encompassing.⁴²

Machiavelli’s context, too, was a patchwork of multiple contexts, some very local in time and place (e.g. Florence’s recent struggles), some much broader (e.g. ancient Greek and Roman influences). But since such a ‘context’ already includes temporally and geographically distant contexts, why would anyone even suggest that ideas cannot transcend a ‘context’?

Boundary problems are universal in the human and even natural sciences. When does a hill become a mountain? When does someone become rich? As regards genesis and validity, boundary problems are not too worrying in practice, provided we accept a degree of looseness when discussing ‘different contexts’. And anyway, such problems are trivial compared to the next one.

2.6. Are things ‘valid’ in diverse contexts?

Jay talks as if ideas and values are valid in their contexts, but some historical examples render this problematic. Was Machiavelli’s account of virtù, so shocking to many Christians, valid in its context? Was his defence of largo republics valid in its context, given that such republics were essentially dead when he wrote? Was slavery valid in its context? What would enslaved people have said about this? In England, wives could legally be raped within marriage until 1992. Was that valid in its context in 1991? What about 1891 or 1791?

The above examples combine two different but closely related issues. First, a given ‘context’ contains many different contexts. As noted above, Jay later recognises this.⁴³ Second, what is the source of validity? If everyone once thought the earth was flat, does that make it valid? If everyone, including women, accepted patriarchy, would that make it valid?

The two issues become particularly troubling when combined. Is a value valid if it was created by one group to subordinate another? I worry that Jay’s idea of context is usually implicitly monolithic, and thus that there is an implicit majoritarianism or universalism in the idea that ideas and especially values are valid in their original contexts. Yet ideas and values are regularly contested.

I prefer to drop talk of ‘validity’ and simply discuss things being applicable in different contexts. But this means that I have now dropped both of Jay’s key terms – genesis and validity. I fear we must do the same for ‘transcendence’, another key term of Jay’s.

2.7. What does ‘transcending’ a context mean?

Jay asks: ‘Can ideas or values transcend their spatial and temporal origins, earning abiding respect for their intrinsic merit, or do they necessarily reflect them in ways that belie their universal pretensions?’.⁴⁴ His book talks repeatedly of ‘transcendence’.

There are several problems here. First, not all ideas and values have universal pretensions. Machiavelli’s ideas on civic virtù were for republics, not principalities. Rousseau may even have restricted his ideas to particular kinds of republic. Mill’s harm principle was not intended for what he saw as ‘backwards’ peoples. Hume, Burke and Hayek show how different conventions fit different people. Most laws apply only to particular countries; few bureaucrats would recommend transporting their laws on education to countries with totally different educational systems. Some laws are recognised as stop-gap measures, awaiting better solutions. I can call something beautiful without pretending that my ideas of beauty are the same as everyone’s else’s: ‘that is beautiful’ can just be shorthand for ‘that seems beautiful to me’. We can criticise past values without claiming the transcendent superiority of our own: ‘that is abhorrent’ may just mean ‘that seems abhorrent to us’.

Second, ‘intrinsic’ is a slippery term. Joseph Raz distinguishes between three kinds of intrinsic value: something that has ultimate value, something that is good in itself, and something that is a constitutive part of one of the first two kinds of intrinsic value.⁴⁵ For example, J.S. Mill saw utility as having ultimate value, liberty as being good in itself, and liberty as also being a constitutive part of utility, since genuine utility must be freely chosen. Nor should we forget instrumental value: liberty is also instrumental to utility, because giving people freedom makes it likelier that they will find utility.

Jay implies that to call one thing superior to another implies absolute values.⁴⁶ But that cannot be right. For example, an immanent critique of a particular socialist society could show that it was unlikely to achieve its desired results; one need not pass judgement on socialism’s value. The focus is on instrumental not intrinsic value: the society has bad means to its ends.

Third, and most important, ‘transcend’ means two very different things. Jay regularly talks, especially at first, as if it means something universally, transcendentally correct – right for all times and places.⁴⁷ But Jay later cites Koselleck to note that ‘transcendent’ may simply mean something that can ‘reach beyond and undergird multiple generations’.⁴⁸ It is not clear what Koselleck or Jay has in mind: no substantive examples from intellectual history are given.

Quoting Koselleck is an unnecessarily complex way of saying that things can transcend their context, i.e. be applicable in at least one other context, without being transcendentally right, i.e. right for all contexts. The former kind of transcendence is undeniably widespread. Similar ideas of freedom, corruption and equality are found in multiple contexts. Machiavelli’s idea of ends excusing the means informed later ideas of reason of state. Rousseau’s ideas influenced Kant, and both Rousseau’s and Kant’s ideas influenced Rawls. There are countless such examples. If ideas could not transcend their contexts, language and morality would need constant reinventing.

We do not need Koselleck to see this; it is abundantly clear from intellectual history. If Koselleck cannot make that point clearly, what we want is not Koselleck but actual examples from intellectual history. Here and elsewhere, though, Jay’s immense learning sometimes obstructs his argument. He often moves sideways, reflecting on others’ ideas, rather than forwards, letting his argument unfold point by point. This preference for examples from the literature, rather than historical examples, can hamper clarity.

At the end of Jay’s introductory chapter, he rightly concludes: ‘it is possible to transcend genetic contexts without assuming the only alternative is the assertion of universal, absolute, timeless validity’.⁴⁹ Jay finds this conclusion ‘especially worth highlighting’.⁵⁰ This worries me. If intellectual historians typically assume anything else, then more philosophical rigour and more actual examples are desperately needed. But I cannot help wondering if Jay’s Genesis and Validity is instead based on a palpably false dichotomy. We do not need Raz’s account of intrinsic value to see that we can learn from other contexts without claiming universal rightness.

So, ‘transcend’ is not a helpful term. It is too ambiguous, and has unfortunate connotations from intellectual history, especially via Hegel. Again, ‘applicability’ in different contexts is a better term.

2.8. How complete must the thing being applied in a different context be?

Jay initially talks of ‘the intact passage of ideas from one [context] to the other’, and quotes John Diggins on whether ‘it is possible to extract the oyster entirely from the pearl that excreted it’.⁵¹

In intellectual history, however, the partial and/or modified passage of ideas is very common. Consider Skinner and Philip Pettit’s appropriation of neo-Roman ideas of liberty – in Pettit’s terms, freedom as non-domination, in contrast to freedom as non-interference.⁵² Even if an enslaved person is not actually interfered with by their owner, they are dominated: their owner could arbitrarily interfere with them if the owner wished, and so the enslaved person is inherently unfree. Historically, this idea was usually restricted to men, often White men. But neither Skinner and Pettit makes that restriction. One recent application of the idea is to reproductive justice among women of colour.⁵³ Is this an ‘intact’ passage of the idea?

Jay may thus need to clarify what intactness involves. For example, he might distinguish sense and reference – the meaning/definition of a term, and what it applies to. The sense of neo-Roman liberty is non-domination; the reference is whether it applies to men, women, leaders, citizens, Whites, non-Whites, and so on. Jay could see an idea as intact if its sense is the same, even if its reference changes.

But I suspect we should drop talk of intactness, focus on applicability in different contexts, and accept that changes will often happen during the application.

2.9. Summary: theorising intellectual history as a symbiosis of history and philosophy

Further distinctions could be made, and readers may disagree with some of mine. But it seems to me that Jay’s framing of the issue needs significant rethinking. ‘Genesis’ is usually irrelevant. ‘Validity’ is misleading. ‘Transcend’ is unhelpful. We address more than just ‘ideas and values’. ‘Contexts’ are not monolithic. Value-judgements need not invoke ‘absolute’, ‘ultimate’ or even ‘intrinsic’ values. Instead, we should discuss applicability in different contexts, without worrying too much about what different contexts are. There is almost certainly no simple answer about what is applicable in different contexts; the answer also depends on whether we are discussing empirical propositions, logical propositions, meanings, concepts, distinctions, aesthetic issues, or normative issues.

I apologise if this makes the supposed debate about genesis and validity not very interesting any more. But ultimately, the key point is methodological. Jay’s discussion of the core theme of his book would benefit from being more philosophical and even more historical. The two also need greater integration. By contrast, my arguments sought a symbiosis between history and philosophy. Historical examples often came first: I would think of a few historical examples before finding one which helped me analyse the issue by asking questions and offering distinctions. Sometimes the questions or distinctions would come first, and I would then see if I could think of an example. If I could, I would take the question or distinction seriously. If not, I would drop it.

So, theorising intellectual history involves a symbiosis between history and philosophy in two ways. First, it is a philosophical analysis of history: one is not doing history, but doing philosophy, about history. Some readers may prefer to call this a ‘theoretical’ analysis of history, and to replace all of this article’s uses of the term ‘philosophical’ with ‘theoretical’; that is fine, provided ‘theory’ in this sense is not confused with theory in the sense of hypotheses (e.g. the hypothesis that great powers decline when they over-reach).

Second, and more important, the methodology of theorising intellectual history – i.e. how we reach our conclusions about the nature of history – does or should involve theorising on the basis of examples, whether the examples or the theory comes first.

I now turn to the symbiosis of history and philosophy in a much more important area: the practice of intellectual history.

3. Practising intellectual history via a symbiosis of history and philosophy

A particularly sad feature of our methodological literature is the widespread caricaturing or neglect of philosophical analysis.⁵⁴ Jay’s book does not caricature philosophical techniques of textual interpretation, but his summary of contextualist history, drawn primarily from Skinner, is largely orthodox and hence neglects philosophical approaches.

We cannot understand authors’ intentions from the text alone, writes Jay. Texts were meant to do something, so we must examine not only the locutionary meaning of what was written but also its illocutionary force. (The ‘illocutionary force’ is what someone meant by saying or writing something, e.g. whether Machiavelli’s Prince was intended as a satire or as sincere advice to princes. In each case, the words might mean the same things, but Machiavelli means different things by those words, and we read the text very differently as a result.) Recovering a text’s illocutionary force gives us ‘the true historical meaning’ of an author’s ‘intervention in the discourse of his time’, and requires ‘contextualization as the historian’s chief modus operandi’.⁵⁵

‘How precisely’ historians should recover authorial intentions is ‘a challenging task’. Skinner, writes Jay, encourages us to address ‘the relevant matrix of conventions through which authors must express their intentions, allowing us to situate them in a polemical field of meaningful alternatives’. Understanding a speech act requires historians ‘to situate it against the backdrop of the prevailing conventional context of the time of its enunciation, and also understand the proximate audience for whom it was intended’.⁵⁶

One can quibble with details of Jay’s summary. For example, Skinner does not say that we cannot understand authors’ intentions from the text alone, but that we cannot understand authors’ meanings or illocutionary forces.⁵⁷ In Jay’s version, Skinner’s claim is circular: understanding intentions requires understanding intentions.

Incidentally, I am not implying that Jay entirely supports Skinner. Indeed, Jay offers several pages of criticisms.⁵⁸ Unfortunately, as so often, this discussion uses abstract claims from the literature, with almost no actual examples. I will suggest shortly that attention to actual examples highlights a much bigger problem: Skinner almost never notes the value of combining historical and philosophical analysis when interpreting texts.

Given this paper’s focus on understanding the theory of intellectual history partly through its practice, it is interesting to note that Jay’s book looks almost entirely at Skinner’s methodological writings, especially his earlier ones, and hardly addresses his substantive interpretations. Jay mentions Skinner’s Foundations twice, but without details of its content.⁵⁹ Jay does not cover Skinner’s later interpretations of Machiavelli, Hobbes and others, or Skinner’s genealogies of liberty, the state, and so on. Jay does mention genealogy several times,⁶⁰ but the only time he does so with reference to Skinner, he discusses genealogy’s use for defending current values, whereas Skinner uses it for criticising current values.⁶¹

Reading Skinner abstractly, and concentrating on his methodological writings, is common.⁶² But we cannot understand Skinner’s contextualism unless we examine actual examples of Skinner’s interpretations. To coin a phrase, we must study what Skinner does, not just what he says should be done. And Skinner’s methodological practice is even richer than his methodological writings.

I will now exemplify the symbiosis between history and philosophy in four aspects of Skinner’s substantive interpretations.

3.1. Empirical reconstruction via conceptual fit and comparison

All textual interpretation involves ‘empirical reconstruction’, especially working out authors’ intended meanings, i.e. the sense and reference of their words and propositions.⁶³ Central to this is the simplest form of philosophical analysis: seeing if a plausible intended meaning ‘fits’ what the author writes and implies.

We do this every day when communicating. For example, if a university colleague says ‘what a mess we’re in!’, my brain may well decide, almost immediately and without conscious effort, whether this refers to the mess our university is in or the mess our country is in. (Probably both!)

For historical texts, our inferences are often slower and more conscious – but not always. Consider the opening of the dedication to Hobbes’s Elements of Law: ‘From the two principal parts of our nature, Reason and Passion, have proceeded two kinds of learning, mathematical and dogmatical’.⁶⁴ In most cases, and especially if one knows a bit about Hobbes’s philosophy, one’s brain will instinctively interpret Reason as involving the mathematical kind of learning, and Passion the dogmatical kind. Now actually, Hobbes might instead mean that the two parts of our nature both produce the two kinds of learning, as if he had written ‘Oxford and Cambridge produce corruption and disorder’. But Hobbes’s meaning should become clearer as the paragraph and indeed the book proceeds, although one’s interpretive inference here may be more conscious than instinctive.

I want now to make a point of considerable importance: contextual analysis itself always needs this kind of philosophical analysis. Consider philological research, especially the tracing of historical usages of terms, e.g. echoes of Roman law in Grotius. For ease of argument, I will depict philology as primarily historical/contextual. Even if philological research shows a term being used in a single, consistent way by a group of classical writers who we know an early modern author read, we still need to ‘plug it in’ to see how well this meaning fits the early modern author’s own usage. Indeed, someone will already have had to plug the meaning in to each of the classical writers before we could conclude that it had a single, consistent meaning.

Non-philological textual analysis also requires this kind of philosophical analysis. Imagine that we are lucky and an author defines a term we are examining. Even here we must plug in this meaning to the author’s other uses of the term, to see how well it fits. If we are lucky, the author’s usage will be consistent. Often, though, authors are inconsistent. For example, Hobbes’s Aristotelian definition of corruption almost never fits his usage in political contexts.⁶⁵

Usually, of course, authors do not define their terms. ‘Locke doesn’t offer you a definition [of coercion], but he gives you examples’, says Skinner in his genealogy of liberty.⁶⁶ From these examples, Skinner seems to infer what Locke meant by coercion: interference by an external agency which bends your will to their designs, by rendering alternatives unavailable.⁶⁷ Skinner’s inference includes a second kind of philosophical analysis which I discuss shortly.

Machiavelli, likewise, does not say what he means by virtù, but writes a lot about it, including many examples. This allows Skinner to offer the following definition of Machiavellian virtù: ‘those qualities, whether moral or otherwise … most conducive to military and political success’.⁶⁸

These inferences are all essentially philosophical: we see what definition or understanding fits what an author writes or implies. Such inferences are usually implicit and extremely quick. But sometimes the process is harder, even if we rarely produce a precise definition. Ultimately, handling concepts is often easier for philosophers, who usually have stronger abstract skills than historians, who usually have stronger concrete/empirical skills. It is nonetheless a skill worth developing, and Skinner’s substantive interpretations thus bear close study.

3.2. Empirical reconstruction by using implications

Jay’s summary of Skinner includes the comment that ‘unless we appreciated what an author like, say, Hobbes or Locke had intended to accomplish with his intervention in the discourse of his time, we were in danger of missing the true historical meaning of his or her efforts’.⁶⁹ But Hobbes and Locke were high-class philosophers. Understanding them requires us to think philosophically, not just historically. Anyone who doubts this should read Hobbes’s discussion of the fool who says in his heart that there is no justice, and see if the meaning is clear.

The problems are compounded when authors were not just philosophically complicated but also incomplete. As I once wrote, ‘The more philosophical the thinker, and the more staccato the thinker, the more we must do this. And Hobbes is very philosophical and very staccato. Skinner is adept at thinking through the problems and joining the dots’.⁷⁰

We saw Skinner resolving one case of incompleteness above – inferring Locke’s definition of coercion from his examples. Skinner’s symbiosis of history and philosophy is even more impressive when tackling ‘a passage of enormous density’ which is not ‘easy to understand’, in Hobbes’s De Cive, concerning freedom and arbitrary impediments. Skinner writes:

To speak of ‘arbitrary’ impediments, Hobbes explains, is to speak of ‘those which do not absolutely impede motion, but do so per accidens, that is to say by our own choice’. … It is unexpected, to say the least, to find him reaching for this piece of Aristotelian terminology, since it exemplifies precisely the kind of scholastic jargon that he normally professes to despise. Nor is it easy to understand what he has in mind. When Francisco Suarez, Hobbes’s bête noire among the Schoolmen, had illustrated the idea of a consequence arising per accidens, he had offered the example of a man who, in the act of digging the ground, happens to dig up some buried treasure. This suggests that a per accidens consequence is equivalent to an outcome unintended by the agent. But it is hard to see any close analogy with [Hobbes’s example of] the man who cannot will to throw himself into the sea [to save his ship from sinking], unless Hobbes regards his inability as nothing more than an unintended and hence a per accidens consequence of his having chosen and thereby willed to act in some other way. It is clear, however, that Hobbes means something more than this, for he argues that the man in the situation he is describing has not merely chosen to do something other than throw himself overboard; rather he has actively been impeded from behaving in this particular way. But if that is so, then what we still need to grasp, in order to understand the concept of an arbitrary impediment, is what kind of force is capable of impeding us from willing to perform an action within our powers.⁷¹

Several philosophical techniques are visible here, including using examples to probe the possible meanings of what was written. I discuss in more detail elsewhere the value of using implications to understand what authors wrote.⁷²

This is much more philosophically sophisticated than the examples from the previous subsection. Indeed, to understand what Skinner says, not just what Hobbes says, most of us will need to read Skinner slowly and recreate what he says in our own heads – just as Skinner is doing the same to understand Hobbes. Philosophically sophisticated texts like Hobbes’s do sometimes need philosophically sophisticated analysis like this.

Philosophical analysis helps us recover not only Hobbes’s meanings but also his broader intentions. Who was Hobbes arguing against in these passages on liberty? Why did he change his account of liberty? We can make some inferences by seeing if these passages, and especially the plausible implications of what Hobbes wrote, cohere with or contradict positions that he may have been trying to support or reject. Such inferences are never certain; but textual interpretation is never certain.⁷³ In short, recovering authorial intentions requires both contextual and philosophical analysis.

3.3. Conceptual distinctions/comparisons

Skinner’s conceptual skills are especially visible in his genealogies. A super example is his genealogy of liberty. Most of this remains unpublished, but there are several videos online, including one dating back to 2008 (ironically, at Berkeley, Jay’s own university).⁷⁴ Skinner shows how Hobbes’s narrow idea of liberty (roughly, the absence of bodily constraint by external forces) is amended by Locke to include coercion of the will, which in turn is amended by Bentham, and then further by Mill.⁷⁵

I must make an admission here. I often do this kind of conceptual analysis, and have published on three of the above authors. And yet until I watched Skinner’s talk, I had not fully grasped how their ideas of liberty differed. I had understood these authors fairly well, but I understood them better by seeing how their ideas of liberty compared.

This again highlights the history/philosophy symbiosis which is central to my paper. Philosophical analysis improved my historical understanding; historical comparison improved my philosophical understanding.

If you watch Skinner’s talk, you might feel that Skinner’s tight conceptual distinctions make him sound like a professional philosopher, not just a professional historian. But obviously, all textual interpreters constantly make looser conceptual distinctions, e.g. recognising that Machiavellian virtù is different to Christian virtue, that virtù is not fortuna, that Mill’s idea of harm is not just physical, that many Anglophone writers use ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ interchangeably, and so on. Making conceptual distinctions and comparisons is something we all do, but sometimes, we do it consciously, explicitly and carefully, and it is here that it may help to recognise and welcome intellectual history’s more philosophical moments.

3.4. Systematic reconstruction

Jay uses the orthodox term, ‘rational reconstruction’, i.e. uncovering ‘the inherent logic of the arguments whose history we are tracing’.⁷⁶ One problem with this term is that it means different things to historians of philosophy and critical theorists. The more important problem is that it conflates what I call ‘systematic reconstruction’, i.e. seeing how ideas link together, and ‘adaptive reconstruction’, i.e. correcting errors and filling in gaps.⁷⁷ In practice the two often overlap, but one can certainly do the former without the latter.

Jay understandably treats rational reconstruction as a different kind of task to standard contextual analysis.⁷⁸ But once we split rational reconstruction into systematic and adaptive reconstruction, we can see that systematic reconstruction is inherent to textual interpretation, including that involved in contextual analysis: it is impossible to understand any passage in a text of any complexity without seeing how some of the ideas connect to each other.

Skinner exemplifies this powerfully, showing how Machiavelli’s idea of virtù is connected to ideas like fortuna, necessità, Christian morality, and so on.⁷⁹ Virtù is the ability to respond to and take control of fortuna, and to do whatever necessità dictates, even if this clashes with Christian morality. Other intellectual historians read Machiavelli similarly.⁸⁰

I think it is uncontroversial to say that we understand Machiavelli better when we see such connections, and in particular, that we have really not understood Machiavelli well if we do not see that virtù is related to fortuna. And yet most intellectual historians, if asked, would probably say that reconstructing an author’s system of ideas is something which philosophers do, not historians. This is an important misconception. Philosophers may take systematic reconstructions further, but all textual interpreters do it.

Moreover, we understand Machiavelli even better by seeing that a prince’s ends are gloria (glory) and mantenere lo stato (maintaining one’s state/power), and grasp that while virtù is instrumental to each of these ends, it is probably also (in Raz’s terms – see above) a constitutive part of glory, if one interprets Machiavelli as implying that one cannot have glory if one achieves great things purely by fortuna.⁸¹

This last reconstruction uses modern terms, which some historians will dislike. But it could be rephrased, somewhat more long-windedly, in Machiavelli’s terms. So, the point stands: we understand Machiavelli better if we see how his ideas fit together.

This understanding of Machiavelli is inherently both historical and philosophical: we have understood the historical Machiavelli, and we have done so philosophically, by seeing how his ideas fit together. Of course, understanding Machiavelli also requires contextual analysis. To reiterate: philosophy can be necessary to intellectual history even when historical analysis is much more important overall.

Systemic reconstruction is thus inherent to textual interpretation in intellectual history, and is evident in the practice of actual intellectual historians. But almost no one notices it, and the misleading term ‘rational reconstruction’ leads most people to think that systematic reconstruction is for philosophers, not historians.

3.5. Summary: the history-philosophy symbiosis when interpreting texts

There are other kinds of philosophical analysis.⁸² But the four kinds described above are inherent to interpreting historical texts. Every intellectual historian empirically reconstructs the texts they read, to greater or lesser extents. This always involves conceptual fit, even when doing contextual analysis of linguistic usage. I suspect that using implications to infer meanings is so common that in practice it is all but intrinsic to understanding a text, even if one does not tackle passages as complex as Hobbes on liberty. Making conceptual distinctions and comparisons is also inevitable, even if one does not get as philosophical as Skinner does above. And some degree of systematic reconstruction is likewise inherent to textual interpretation, even if intellectual historians rarely take it as far as philosophers.

Jay’s book only discusses intellectual history’s need for historical analysis, not philosophical analysis. This follows the methodological orthodoxy – an orthodoxy strongly influenced by Skinner’s own methodological writings, which do not discuss one of Skinner’s most important interpretive tools.

4. Conclusion

Martin Jay is one of the most philosophical of intellectual historians, but his book Genesis and Validity does not get to grips with the symbiotic relationship between history and philosophy, as regards either the theory or practice of intellectual history.

Theorising intellectual history, I have argued, is a philosophical activity which benefits from analytical distinctions, closely combined with historical examples. Offering such a symbiosis led me to offer a near-total reconceptualisation of the central theme of Jay’s book – the relationship between genesis and validity.

Interpreting historical texts, meanwhile, is also a philosophical activity requiring a symbiosis of history and philosophy. The orthodox view treats intellectual history as essentially historical. It is, but it is also essentially philosophical. Jay’s book overlooks this, as does most of our methodological literature, including Skinner’s methodological writings. Yet much excellent intellectual history shows the power of philosophical analysis, including Skinner’s substantive interpretations.

Two of the world’s leading intellectual historians thus say things about intellectual history which miss key parts of what they do. Given the symbiosis between history and philosophy, it is perhaps no surprise that these leading intellectual historians are also unusually philosophically accomplished. But it is a surprise that their theories of intellectual history say so little about philosophical analysis. In the 1960s, Skinner even wrote that given the poor state of Hobbes scholarship, ‘it is less philosophy, and more history, which is needed’.⁸³ Now that we have seen not only the huge benefits of the historical turn in philosophical scholarship, but also the inherent importance of philosophical analysis in interpreting historical texts, we can say that ‘it is more history and more philosophy which are needed – in conjunction’.

So what? Why does this matter? After all, if history and philosophy are inevitably in symbiosis, then intellectual historians already do philosophy, whether they realise it or not. Why make such a big deal about something that is already being done?

My response to this is simple: we can do better history if we see its symbiotic link to philosophy. When theorising intellectual history, we can be more analytical, use more historical examples, and link the analysis and the examples better. But the bigger payoffs come when interpreting texts. We can see more clearly which techniques to use and which skills to develop, especially in terms of thinking through ideas to see their implications, and making careful conceptual distinctions and comparisons.

We might thus consider ensuring that our graduate training offers a suitably practical approach to textual interpretation. Skinner’s methodological writings are excellent, but his substantive interpretations illustrate better how he actually does contextualist history. In particular, the way he thinks through authors philosophically is a brilliant illustration of the symbiosis between history and philosophy. Especially when we are reading historical authors who are philosophically sophisticated, we need to do their thinking for ourselves.

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.