Visions of Politics: Regarding Method (Volume I )
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method (Volume I )
Cambridge University Press | ISBN 0521589266 | 2002 | PDF | 1 MB | 227 pages
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The chapters in volume I, Regarding Method, are all offered as contributions to the articulation and defence of one particular view about the reading and interpretation of historical texts. I argue that, if we are to write the history of ideas in a properly historical style, we need to situate the texts we study within such intellectual contexts and frameworks of discourse as enable us to recognise what their authors were doing in writing them. To speak more fashionably, I emphasise the performativity of texts and the need to treat them intertextually. My aspiration is not of course to perform the impossible task of getting inside the heads of longdead thinkers; it is simply to use the ordinary techniques of historical enquiry to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to recover their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way.
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Quentin Skinner is Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ
