autonomous mode of historical enquiry. The writing of texts, the slower for-
mation 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 languages, to be studied as such.
Important claims can be made about the increase and intensiWcation of
historical knowledge 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 question ‘‘what was it that 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 establishing it as a
historical phenomenon.
2 History and Theory: The Encounter
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
The activity of the mind called ‘‘political theory’’ will have been deWned—
probably, and properly, in more ways than one—by the contributors to this
volume. For purposes of abbreviation, I will suppose that they have deWned 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
theory in history: problems of context and narrative 165