scholarly journals Meanings and Understandings in the History of Ideas

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-256
Author(s):  
Adrian Blau
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Intellectual Foundations

Abstract This paper presents a framework of four types of meaning and understanding in the history of political thought and intellectual history. Previous frameworks have overlooked a whole type of meaning – the type often prioritised by political theorists and philosophers. I call this “extended meaning.” Correcting a wrong turn in philosophy of language in the 1950s, I show how extended meaning has robust intellectual foundations, and I illustrate its value for textual interpreters. Even historians often need extended meaning, for example to help resolve ambiguous passages. So, the main types of meaning are not alternatives: scholars interested in one kind of meaning still need others. This paper thus celebrates both diversity and unity.

scholarly journals A Step Forward

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
João Feres Júnior
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Graphic Design ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Paper Format

Contributions to the History of Concepts has now completed two years of existence. Its history has been closely tied to the annual meetings of the History of Political and Social Concepts Group (HPSCG). Talks about evolving from the HPSCG’s Newsletter to an academic periodical publication began in Bilbao, in 2003. The following year, at the 7th International Conference on the History of Concepts, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, we designed a plan to create a new journal that would serve as a conduit for researchers working with conceptual history, as well as for scholars interested in other related fields, such as intellectual history, the history of political thought, the history of ideas, etc. After a great deal of ground work, the journal was finally launched in 2005, both in digital and paper format, with an elegant graphic design and a host of excellent texts by distinguished scholars in the fields of conceptual history, intellectual history, and the history of political thought, such as Quentin Skinner, Melvin Richter, Kari Palonen, and Robert Darnton. The response from the international academic community was immediate and very encouraging. Since then positive feedback from a growing audience worldwide has been constantly on the rise.

A Virtue for Courageous Minds

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
Intellectual Foundations

Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, this book examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy. The book begins with classical thinkers who extolled the virtues of a moderate approach to politics, such as Aristotle and Cicero. It then shows how Montesquieu inaugurated the modern rebirth of this tradition by laying the intellectual foundations for moderate government. The book looks at important figures such as Jacques Necker, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, not only in the context of revolutionary France but throughout Europe. It traces how moderation evolves from an individual moral virtue into a set of institutional arrangements calculated to protect individual liberty, and explores the deep affinity between political moderation and constitutional complexity. The book demonstrates how moderation navigates between political extremes, and it challenges the common notion that moderation is an essentially conservative virtue, stressing instead its eclectic nature. Drawing on a broad range of writings in political theory, the history of political thought, philosophy, and law, the book reveals how the virtue of political moderation can address the profound complexities of the world today.

Roger Boesche: The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 419-422
Author(s):  
James Schleifer
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of

Roger Boesche, Chair of the Department of Political Science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, lias already written several thoughtful articles about Tocqueville, each marked by clarity of thought and expression: ’The Prison: Tocqueville’s Model for Despotism,” Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980):550-63; “The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville,” History of Political Thought 2 (Winter 1981): 495-524; “Why Could Tocqueville Predict So Well?” Political Theory 11 (February 1983): 79-104; “Tocqueville and Le Commerce’. A Newspaper Expressing His Unusual Liberalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (April-June 1983): 277-92; and “Hedonism and Nihilism: The Predictions of Tocqueville and Nietzsche,” The Tocqueville Review 8 (1986/87): 165-84.

scholarly journals Ein Modell Politischer Diskursanalyse

2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAIMUND OTTOW
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Model ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Cambridge School

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.

STRATEGY AS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1007-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL ISAAC
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strategic Thought

The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-centuryrealpolitik, and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of international relations and war studies, intellectual historians have, for the most part, left the matter to the experts. The strategic maxims of Clausewitz and Liddell Hart may fascinate IR theorists, political scientists, and military historians, but they seldom fire the imaginations of tender-minded historians of ideas. The two books under review challenge such preconceptions. They ask us to consider the history of Cold War strategic thought in a wider conceptual frame. Buried in the history of strategy, they suggest, are some of the central themes of postwar social and political thought.

Introduction: when ideas travel: political theory, colonialism, and the history of ideas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burke A. Hendrix ◽  
Deborah Baumgold
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of

Ideas travel. The history of political thought as it has generally been studied is deeply interested in these forms of travel and in the transformations that occur along the way. Ideas of a social contract first crystallize in the England of Hobbes and Locke, and then travel in branching ways to Jefferson’s North America, Robespierre’s France, Kant’s Prussia, and elsewhere. In their travels, these ideas hybridize with others, are repurposed in new social contexts, and often take on political meanings deeply divergent from what their originators intended. Students of the history of political thought are acutely aware of these complexities in the development of European political ideas during the early modern and modern eras, given the centrality of such ideas for shaping the political worlds in which we now live....

scholarly journals The Politics of Contextualism

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-371
Author(s):  
Petri Koikkalainen
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Professional Research ◽  
Normative Content ◽  
Central Purpose ◽  
Normative Aspect

A central purpose of historicist contextualism, or the “new history of political thought”, the central methodological ideas of which were laid out between the 1950s and the 70s, was to liberate the history of ideas from distorting influence of political ideology, nationalism, and other presentist narratives that ascribed past events under false teleologies. From the 1980s onwards, it has been possible to find explicitly normative statements in the works of the leading contextualist historians and scholars influenced by their work, for example, Skinner’s defences of neo-Roman republicanism. This article examines the normative content of contextualism. Instead of arguing that the normative aspect was a novelty introduced after the 1980s, the claim here is that contextualist theorising was socially and politically implicated and arguably normative from its very beginning. To substantiate this, the article offers an interpretation of the normativity of early contextualism based on its relationship towards broader socio-political themes such as ideology, agency, emancipation, progress, and societies’ relationship with their pasts. Early contextualist normativity assumed that the professional research of history would be a suitable and sufficient way of generating also socially desirable outcomes. Later, as the political and academic background conditions changed, this normativity was given more explicit (e.g. republican) formulations in order to keep up its political relevance.

scholarly journals The Cambridge School and Kripke: Bug Detecting with the History of Political Thought

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Bosworth ◽  
Keith Dowding
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Step Method ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
New Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Opinions ◽  
Theories Of Meaning ◽  
Cambridge School

AbstractWe propose a two-step method for studying the history of political thought roughly in line with the contextualism of the Cambridge School. It reframes the early Cambridge School as a bug-detecting program for the outdated conceptual baggage we unknowingly accommodate with our political terminology. Such accommodation often entails propositions that are inconsistent with even our most cherished political opinions. These bugs can cause political arguments to crash. This reframing takes seriously the importance of theories of meaning in the formative methodological arguments of the Cambridge School and updates the argument in light of new developments. We argue the new orthodoxy of Saul Kripke's causal theory of meaning in the philosophy of language better demonstrates the importance of contextual analysis to modern political theory.

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