Skinner and others, 2 has taken the form of a close scrutiny of the history—a
key word has been ‘‘context’’—in which texts and patterns of political dis-
course 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 further
contexts, the political, religious, social, and historical situations in which
authors and their publics were situated; and what these were is to be dis-
covered as much from the implications 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—histor-
ians pursue the interactions 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 author; the tensions between what an
author ‘‘meant’’ to say and what a text ‘‘meant’’ to others, 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: Leviathanwas written in both English and
Latin, and one may diVerentiate 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
released 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.
2 Skinner ( 2002 , i); Tully and Skinner ( 1988 ); Palonen ( 2003 ); Pocock ( 1962 , 1985 , 1987 ).168 j. g. a. pocock