Relevance of contextualist approach to the study of political theory. (2001)
The contextualist approach, associated with the Cambridge School, holds that a classic text can be understood only by recovering what its author was doing in writing it, within the political argument of his own time. Its manifesto is Quentin Skinner‘s “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (History and Theory, 1969), developed by J. G. A. Pocock and John Dunn. Its relevance lies in disciplining how we read the canon and in widening what theory can think.
The method
- Texts as speech acts: borrowing J. L. Austin‘s How to Do Things with Words (1962), Skinner asks for a text’s illocutionary force — was the author endorsing, attacking or satirising a position in a live dispute?
- Languages of politics: Pocock reconstructs the vocabularies available to an author; The Machiavellian Moment (1975) traced a civic-republican language from Florence to revolutionary America.
- Dunn (1969) read John Locke as a Calvinist answering seventeenth-century questions, not a proto-liberal.
Against the textualists
The target was the textualist view that the classics address perennial questions. Skinner catalogued its mythologies:
- Doctrines — crediting an author with a view on a topic he never addressed;
- Coherence — forcing a unified system on writings full of shifts;
- Prolepsis — reading a text for its significance to later events (Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a forerunner of totalitarianism);
- Parochialism — measuring past authors against present concepts.
Leo Strauss (Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952) represents the opposite pole: great authors wrote esoterically under persecution, so the reader must decode a hidden teaching from the text itself.
Relevance
- Accuracy: it prevents anachronism — Locke’s trust meant what his contemporaries took it to mean.
- Recovering lost alternatives: Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism (1998) recovered neo-roman liberty as freedom from domination, feeding the contemporary republicanism of Philip Pettit.
- Self-knowledge: Skinner’s reply to the charge of irrelevance: the past shows which of our arrangements are contingent rather than necessary; we must learn to do our own thinking for ourselves.
- An Indian illustration: M. K. Gandhi‘s Hind Swaraj is often read as a literal programme against railways, doctors and lawyers. In context, it was written in Gujarati on the voyage from London to South Africa in November 1909, months after Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated Sir William Curzon Wyllie; its dialogue answers a “Reader” who voices the revolutionaries’ case. Its illocutionary point was to deny that violent nationalism, seeking English rule without the Englishman, amounted to swaraj.
Limits
- Antiquarianism and relativism: if Locke speaks only to 1688, why study him now? Straussians reply that questions of justice recur.
- Hermeneutic objection: Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, 1960) held that no reader escapes his own horizon; Jacques Derrida denied any final authorial meaning.
- Elusive intentions and Eurocentrism: “context” is selected by the historian, and the School’s canon remains largely Western.
Conclusion
Contextualism is indispensable as a discipline against anachronism and as a way of recovering forgotten political languages; it fails only when it forbids asking what a text means for us. The best practice reads a work in its moment in order to use it more honestly in ours.