J. G. A. Pocock - Theory in History Problems of Context and Narrative

Theory in History Problems of Context and Narrative

J. G. A. Pocock
The Oxford Handbook of Political Science
Edited by Robert E. Goodin
Print Publication Date: Jul 2011 Subject: Political Science, Political Theory
Online Publication Date: Sep 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199604456.013.0004
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines the context and narrative problems associated with the study of the
history of political theory. It suggests that in order to study the relations between political
theory and history, it is necessary to study these terms and reduce them to manageable
forms. It explains that the histories of political thought/theory were canonically construct
ed and they arranged modes of discourse in an order which it had come to be agreed
formed the history being presented.
Keywords: political theory, history, political thought, discourse, canons
1 The Problems of Terminology

To construct a study of the relations between “political theory” and “history”—as concep
tualized phenomena or as disciplines we practice—it is necessary to study these terms
and, if possible, to reduce them to manageable forms. The term “political theory” is im
precise; it has been used in a diversity of ways, and the contributors to this Handbook are
probably not agreed on any single usage. From the standpoint from which this chapter is
written, it is observable that “political theory” is often used as if it were interchangeable
with “political thought,” a term equally inexact. In the first half of the twentieth century,
there were written a number of “histories of political thought,” or of “political theory,” of
which the subject-matter and the method were practically indistinguishable. By “political
thought” (and therefore “theory”) were meant a number of intellectual disciplines—or al
ternatively, modes of rhetoric—which had from time to time been applied to a subject or
subjects which it was agreed formed that of “politics.” The “history” of these modes of
discourse was agreed to form the “history of political thought” or “theory.” They con
tained much that amounted to a “theoretical” treatment of an abstract concept of “poli
tics,” and each of them—at least in principle—had generated a second-order discourse
which critically examined its conduct, and so amounted to “theory” in a further sense of
that term.
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These “histories” of political thought/theory were canonically constructed; that is,

(p. 103)
they arranged modes of discourse—and above all, the major texts that had acquired clas
sical status and authority in each—in an order which it had come to be agreed formed the
“history” being presented. Classically—and, it should be emphasized, for historical rea
sons, many of which were good—they began with the invention in fourth-century Athens
of what was termed “political philosophy,” so that “political philosophy” became a term of
equal status (and imprecision) with “political thought” and “theory.” A historical grand
narrative emerged, in which “the history of political thought,” “theory,” or “philosophy”
moved from Platonic or Aristotelian beginnings through a medieval period in which “phi
losophy” encountered Christian theology, into one in which this encounter was liquidated
and replaced by modes of thought, theory, and philosophy it was agreed to term “mod
ern.”
It was a further characteristic of these “histories” that they were not written by histori
ans so much as by “political theorists” and “philosophers” who held that the study of this
“history” was in some way conducive to the enterprise or enquiry in which they were
themselves engaged. To study “the history of political theory” was helpful to the practice
of “political theory.” This assumption came, at and after the middle of the twentieth cen
tury, to be attacked in two ways. There arose ways of conducting both the empirical and
the normative study of politics which claimed to have no need of historical knowledge—
still described in its canonical form—because they possessed means of validating, criticiz
ing, verifying or falsifying, the statements that they made, which depended upon the
method that they practiced and not upon historical circumstance or character. This may
be considered one of the moments at which the term “political science” made its appear
ance. Concurrently—and in some ways in response to this development—historians ap
peared who proposed (often aggressively) to reduce “the history of political thought” to a
rigorously autonomous mode of historical enquiry. The writing of texts, the slower forma
tion of belief systems or “philosophies,” were to be reduced to historical performances or
“speech acts,” the actions of historical actors in circumstances and with intentions that
could be ascertained. They were not part of a “theory of politics;” or if they were, the
processes by which they had come to be so, and the very existence of “political theories”
themselves, were historical processes in the performance of acts and the formation of lan
guages, to be studied as such.
Important claims can be made about the increase and intensification of historical knowl
edge which this revolution in method brings about. The theorist or philosopher is faced
with the question of whether “political theory” is or is not to be reduced to the knowledge
of its own history. A typical response has been to treat this question as itself a problem in
theory or philosophy, and it can be observed that more has been written about Quentin
Skinner—a leader in the historical revolution—as political theorist or philosopher than as
historian. The author of this article, however, treats Skinner’s work, and his own, as the
construction of historical narratives, in which things happen (in this case the utterance of
theoretical statements about politics), the conditions or “contexts” in which they happen
exist and change, and processes occur in the history of these performances that can be
narrated. In what follows, it will be presupposed that a “historian,” interested in the ques
Page 2 of 9

tion “what was it that (p. 104) was happening?”, and a “political theorist,” engaged in an
enquiry possessing its own ways of self-validation, confront each other over the reading of
a given text. I will bias my own enquiry by pointing out that the text will be a historical
artifact, but that the theorist desires to make use of it for purposes other than establish
ing it as a historical phenomenon.
2 History and Theory: The Encounter

The activity of the mind called “political theory” will have been defined—probably, and
properly, in more ways than one—by the contributors to this volume. For purposes of ab
breviation, I will suppose that they have defined it as the construction of heuristic and
normative statements, or systems of such statements, about an area of human experience
and activity called “politics” or “the political.” I will also suppose that the activity called
“political theory” is a discipline possessing its own rules: that is to say, the statements it
aims to construct acknowledge certain procedures according to which they are construct
ed and may be validated and criticized. There will instantly arise, however, a further ac
tivity of questioning how such procedures have been and are being constructed, to what
capacities of the mind they make appeal, whether their claims to validity are or have been
justifiable, and in short whether, and how, it is possible to construct a discipline called
“political theory” at all. This activity of the second order may be called “political philoso
phy”—although this term has borne other meanings—and distinguished from “political
theory” as carried on at levels confident enough of its procedures to dispense, at least
provisionally, with the questioning of them at the levels called “philosophy.” Having made
this distinction, of course, we observe that the two activities continually intersect, al
though the distinction does not disappear.
It is valuable to imagine the “political theorist”—given that this term may have more than
one meaning—confronted by a “historian of political thought,” who regards “political the
ory,” in any of its meanings, as one of many ways in which “thought,” or rather “dis
course,” about “politics” has been going on. Even if we suppose our agonists to agree on
a definition of the activity to be called “political theory,” and to agree that this activity has
had a continuous history of some duration, there will remain many senses in which they
do not and perhaps should not have much to say to one another. The “theorist” is interest
ed in the making of statements (hypotheses?) obedient to certain modes of validation; the
“philosopher” in the question of how (and whether) it is possible to construct these (or
any) modes of validation (or evaluation). The historian is not interested primarily, al
though perhaps secondarily, in any of these questions, but in the question “what
happened?” (or was happening)—more broadly still, “what was it that was happening?”—
when events or processes occurred in the past under study. One aims to characterize, to
evaluate, to explicate (rather than explain), and therefore in the last analysis to narrate,
actions (p. 105) performed in the recorded past; and if they were performed according to,
or even in search of, certain modes of validation, one is interested in their performance
rather than their validity, and in the validations to which they appealed as the context
that renders them the happenings they were. The questions “is this statement valid?” and
Page 3 of 9

“what has happened when it is made?” are not identical, unless—and this is the issue—
the theorist who asks the former can oblige the historian who asks the latter to admit that
nothing has been going on except the practice of a certain mode of validation; and this
the questions asked by the “philosopher” have already rendered somewhat uncertain.
The historian, then, may be thought of as scrutinizing the actions and activity of political
theory, and asking questions about what it has been and done, answers to which will nec
essarily take the form of narratives of actions performed and their consequences. The
historian’s activity is clearly not identical with that of the political theorist. Before we go
on to set these two activities in confrontation and interaction, it is desirable to ask
whether “histories of political theory” have been or may be constructed, and what charac
ter they may possess. Here the focus of our enquiry shifts. A “history of political theory”
would clearly move beyond the scrutiny of particular acts in the construction of such the
ory, and would suppose “political theory” to be and have been an ongoing activity, about
which generalizations may be made and which can be said to have undergone changes in
its general character over the course of time; changes which could be recounted in the
form of a narrated history. There are, however, few such histories; few, that is, which are
or may be called histories of political “theory” in any sense in which that term may be dis
tinguished from, or isolated within, the “history of political thought” as the academic
genre it has become. Histories of this kind are themselves indeterminate, in the sense
that options exist and have been exercised as to what kinds of literature may or should be
included in them, and it is a consequence that the terms “political thought” and “political
theory” have often been used interchangeably, or with no precise attention to differences
between them. The political theorist whose attention turns to history, therefore, is often
confronted with historical narratives whose content bears little relation to the activity of
“political theory” as it may have been defined. It is not unreasonable if such a theorist
asks why such histories deserve attention.
3 Histories and their Purpose

In the last forty or fifty years, canonical histories of this kind have fallen into disfavor (al
though there have recently been some signs of a revival1). The best-known alternative in
English, associated with the work of Quentin Skinner and others,2 has taken (p. 106) the
form of a close scrutiny of the history—a key word has been “context”—in which texts and
patterns of political discourse may be situated and said to have happened. It will be seen
that the distance, mentioned earlier, between the questions asked by the theorist or
philosopher, and by the historian, has grown wider. Historians of this school look upon the
political literature of any period as composed of acts of speech or writing, articulations
performed by authors in the language or diversity of languages available to them. These
languages have histories; they can be seen in formation and in change; the performances
of authors act in and upon them; and this is the sense in which they can be termed the
primary “context” in which texts and debates happen in history. There are of course fur
ther contexts, the political, religious, social, and historical situations in which authors and
their publics were situated; and what these were is to be discovered as much from the im
Page 4 of 9

plications of their languages as from the researches of historians. What actors thought
was happening is of equal importance with what historians think was happening; history
is the study of subjective behavior.
In this multiplicity of “contexts”—both linguistic and situational—historians pursue the in

teractions between an author’s intentions, the language available for him or her to use,
and the responses of those who read, or were informed concerning, the text and its au
thor; the tensions between what an author “meant” to say and what a text “meant” to oth
ers, are often complex and productive of ambivalences. It may be the case that an author
wrote in more than one “context” and was read in contexts other than those he intended.
To give examples: Leviathan was written in both English and Latin, and one may differen
tiate between Hobbes’s intention and reception in a circle of philosophers in Paris, the
court of the exiled Stuarts, the pamphlet-reading public in London, and the Dutch and
German universities. The works of Machiavelli were written in manuscript for discussion
groups in the politics of Florence, and it was by others after his death that they were re
leased on the print networks of Europe, where they were read and responded to by other
groups and publics, in ways it is not immediately certain he intended. The happenings of
communication and performance are of primary concern to the historian, but not to the
political theorist. The former is interested in what an author “meant” and in what a text
“meant” to actors in history; the latter in what it “means” to a theorist, in the context of
the enquiry she or he is conducting.
Works on the history of political thought, written in the above manner, tend to be micro
histories rather than macrohistories, studies of particular performances, actions, and
compositions, focused on the immediate context of the action rather than its long-term
consequences. If confined—as there is no reason why they should not be—to a particular
text or group of texts, and to the state of the language culture at the time these were
written, they will be synchronous rather than diachronous in their emphasis; and it has
been asked whether the contextualist approach is capable of supplying a history of con
texts. This, however, can be done in several ways. The text and its author can be shown
innovating in and acting upon the language in which the text is written, obliging the lan
guage to say new things and modify or reverse its implications. The text can be studied as
it is read and responded to by others, (p. 107) becoming what it means to them as distinct
from what its author intended. Lastly, texts sometimes outlive both their authors and the
contexts in which they are written, traveling both in space and in time to act and be acted
upon in contexts of language and circumstance sharply unlike those in which they re
ceived their original meaning. There will now be the possibility of historical narrative, re
counting both how the text underwent changes in use and meaning, perhaps and perhaps
not continuing to convey its author’s intentions in situations he cannot have foreseen, and
how the language context underwent change for reasons not reducible to the intended
performances of identifiable speech actors. It may even be possible—although it seems
that it must be questionable—to supply unified “histories of political thought,” in which
one pattern of consensus and challenge is progressively replaced by another, although re
cent Cambridge Histories have tended to present several such histories going on concur
rently in contexts distinguishable from one another.3 If anything like the former canonical
Page 5 of 9

histories is restored, it will probably be the work of political theorists desirous of a usable
past, rather than of historians not interested in supplying them with one.
4 The Encounter Resumed

To suppose a direct encounter between a political theorist and a historian, each engaged
in studying the same text, we must make two assumptions. In the first place, we should
suppose the theorist to be carrying out a programme of theoretical enquiry, possessing its
own discipline and means of validating the statements it advances; this will enable us to
juxtapose the theorist’s propositions with those put forward by the historian, and enquire
into any meeting or collision that may appear between them. In the second place—and
here it is hard to avoid placing an additional burden on the theorist—we must suppose
that the two actors are studying the same text, which has not been written by the theorist
but by some other agent at some point in history. It is hard, although in principle not im
possible, to imagine the historian studying a text written by a contemporary theorist as if
it were a historical phenomenon. Historians are typically concerned with the past; they
let time go by, during which evidence may assemble and perspectives emerge and alter.
But once we suppose the theorist to be engaged with a text written by another hand, and
itself a historical document, we must ask why this is happening, and what role a text writ
ten by another and—the historian instantly adds—in another context plays in the self-dis
cipline and self-validating enterprise we have supposed the theorist to be conducting. The
answer to our questions may emerge in literary and almost serendipitous terms. The the
orist has, for whatever reason, read the historic text and finds its language to serve the
purpose of some enterprise in political theory being conducted in the present; the (p. 108)
language of the text is therefore presented as a proposition to be evaluated in the terms
and by the criteria of the present enterprise. The historian now appears, asking questions
and making statements concerning the intentions of the text’s author and the meaning (a
two-faced term) of his words in the context or contexts he and they occupied in history. In
what ways, if any, will the propositions advanced by theorist and historian affirm or deny
one another?
The theorist may assert that the author in the past was engaged in a programme of politi
cal theorizing identical with, or very closely resembling, that being conducted by the the
orist in the present; so that the author’s language may be quoted, cited, or paraphrased
as language employed in the theorist’s enterprise. The historian will scrutinize this asser
tion. We will suppose her or him capable of understanding a programme of political theo
ry conducted in the present, as well as of reconstructing the languages in which pro
grams of a similar kind have been conducted in past historical contexts. Such a historian
will therefore be capable of pronouncing the theorist’s assertion valid or invalid. If the
former, the past author’s language can be employed in the present theorist’s enterprise
without doing violence to the former (with which the historian, as historian, is primarily
concerned); that is without doing violence to the past author’s intentions or the meanings
Page 6 of 9

of the words used in the text. It is not in principle impossible that this will be the outcome
of the historian’s enquiry.
But the historian’s business is with then, not now; with what the author was doing,4 with
what was happening and happened when the text was written, published, read, and an
swered. The former’s concern is with contexts, rather than programs; with the multiplici
ty of contexts in which the text may have had meaning and may have been intended; with
the diversity of languages (or conceptual vocabularies) in which it will have been read
and may even have been written (since authors are not incapable of recognizing multiva
lence and taking part in it). The theorist’s reading of the text will therefore have been an
act of selection, a decision to read the text as engaged in a particular program, even if
the author proves to have made the same decision. The historian is interested in the mul
tiplicity of the things that have happened and the contexts in which they happened, and
will probably respond, even in the extreme case where it can be shown that an author
wrote in only one language and was engaged in only one enterprise, by enquiring if that
is the only way in which others read and have read that author’s works. When texts out
live the historical situation in which they were first written and read, intended and under
stood, the likelihood of a diversity of effect becomes greater.
The theorist is performing an act of selection on grounds which are not those on which
the historian acts. We have so far supposed a situation in which this selection raises no
problems for the historian and is even acceptable as a historical statement about the
text’s or the author’s “meaning,” but it is methodologically interesting to move away from
this supposition. Suppose instead that what the theorist is doing is less quotation than
translation; a removal of the author’s words from the meanings and implications they
bore in a past historical context to those they may bear in a (p. 109) present context—one,
that is, defined by the enterprise the theorist is engaged in rather than by any other lan
guage situation. The last stipulation implies that the enterprise is purely theoretical and
is not being carried on into practice, since practice takes place in a world of multiple con
texts and history. Given this condition, however, the theorist may still be asked why the
historically distant text has been chosen as the subject of this act of translation. The an
swer may be that it has happened accidentally; the theorist happens to have read this
text, and it happens that its language lends itself to this theoretical purpose. The circum
stance that the author had similar intentions, or alternatively that his or her language can
be so interpreted, is itself accidental; we are in a situation where history is accidental, or
incidental, to theory. These hypothetical circumstances, however, entail different histori
cal statements; the former is about the author acting in her or his moment in history, the
latter about the action and moment of the theorist. The latter claims to be acting now,
making a statement whose validity does not depend upon the historical context in which
it is performed. It may be called positivist in the sense that it offers its own conditions of
validation and appeals only to them.
This is of course wholly justifiable; it is valuable to set up laboratories and construct hy
potheses subject to validation under rigorously controlled conditions. A common conse
quence of falsification, however, is the discovery that something was present which the
Page 7 of 9

experiment did not foresee or succeed in excluding, and here our theorist’s enterprise
may be the better for knowing its own history; what exactly are the conditions it speci
fies, and why does it specify these and not others? This question becomes all the more
pressing as we enter the realms of practice and history, where the conditions under
which, and the contexts in which, we operate can never be defined with finality. Here we
pass beyond the simple dialogue between theorist and historian, beyond the problem of
congruence between a text’s meaning in the present and those it has borne in pasts. The
historian has begun to resemble a post-Burkean moderate conservative, reminding us
that there is always more going on than we can comprehend at any one moment and con
vert into either theory or practice. One has become something of a political theorist in
one’s own right, advancing, and inviting others to explore, the proposition that political
action and political society are always to be understood in a context of historical narra
tive. There is room therefore for consideration of historiography as itself a branch of po
litical thought and theory, literature and discourse.
The theorist, however, may be imagined using historical information, making historical
assumptions either explicit or implicit, or reflecting upon historical processes as these ap
pear relevant to the enterprise in political theory being conducted.5 The question now
arises whether these operations are entailed by the method of framing and validating
statements in which the theorist is engaged, or whether they are incidental or accidental
to it. If the former, the theorist is claiming to make historical statements validated in ei
ther the same ways as those the historian practices, or in other ways which must be de
fined and defended. If the latter—and this the historian (p. 110) finds easier to imagine—
the distinction between “political theory” and “political thought” has begun to disappear:
that is, the former has begun to coexist with other modes of political discourse, and we
are re-entering the historical world in which discourses interact, modifying, changing,
confusing, and distorting one another. There are historians who study and narrate what
goes on in this world; it is possible that there may be a “political theory” which addresses
the same phenomena.
References
Burns, J. H. (ed.) 1988. The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c.
1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——and Goldie, M. (eds.) 1991. The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coleman, J. 2000. A History of Political Thought from the Ancient Greeks to the Early
Christians; A History of Political Thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Lon
don: Athlone Press.
Goldie, M. and Wokler, R. (eds.) 2006. The Cambridge History of Eighteenth Century Po
litical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palonen, K. 2003. Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Page 8 of 9

Pocock, J. G. A. 1962. The history of political thought: a methodological enquiry. In Philos

ophy, Politics and Society: Second Series, ed. P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
——1985. Introduction: the state of the art. In J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and His
tory: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
——1987. Texts as events: reflections on the history of political thought. In Politics of Dis
course: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. K. Sharpe and S.
N. Zwicker. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schochet, G. J. 1994. Why should history matter? Political theory and the history of politi
cal discourse. In The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock,
G. J. Schochet, and L. G. Schwoerer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skinner, Q. 1978. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
——2002. Visions of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tully, J. and Skinner, Q. (eds.) 1988. Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Crit
ics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Notes:
(1) For example, Coleman (2000); she might not accept the adjective “canonical.”
(2) Skinner (2002, i); Tully and Skinner (1988); Palonen (2003); Pocock (1962, 1985,
1987).
(3) Burns (1988); Burns with Goldie (1991); Goldie and Wokler (2006).
(4) Skinner (1978, i, xiii).
(5) Schochet (1994).
J. G. A. Pocock
J. G. A. Pocock is Harry C. Black Emeritus Professor at Johns Hopkins University.
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Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: political theory, history, political thought, discourse, canons

1 The Problems of Terminology

date: 06 February 2021

These “histories” of political thought/theory were canonically constructed; that is,

date: 06 February 2021

2 History and Theory: The Encounter

date: 06 February 2021

3 Histories and their Purpose

date: 06 February 2021

In this multiplicity of “contexts”—both linguistic and situational—historians pursue the in­

date: 06 February 2021

4 The Encounter Resumed

date: 06 February 2021

date: 06 February 2021

date: 06 February 2021

Pocock, J. G. A. 1962. The history of political thought: a methodological enquiry. In Philos­

Skinner, Q. 1978. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge

——2002. Visions of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(4) Skinner (1978, i, xiii).

(5) Schochet (1994).

J. G. A. Pocock is Harry C. Black Emeritus Professor at Johns Hopkins University.

date: 06 February 2021

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In this multiplicity of “contexts”—both linguistic and situational—historians pursue the in

Pocock, J. G. A. 1962. The history of political thought: a methodological enquiry. In Philos