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
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 answered. The former’s concern is with con-
texts, rather than programs; with the multiplicity 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
multivalence 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 multiplicity 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 outlive the historical situation in which they were
Wrst written and read, intended and understood, the likelihood of a diversity
of eVect 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 accept-
able 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 present context—one,
that is, deWned by the enterprise the theorist is engaged in rather than by any
other language 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 contexts 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 answer may be that it
4 Skinner ( 1978 , i, xiii).theory in history: problems of context and narrative 171