We Have a Firm Foundation 43we must presume that their doctrines may be true and that there is a tradition of such
writers with similar aims. As Bloom comments, ‘philosophy has, at its peaks, largely
been a dialogue between the greats, no matter how far separated in time’ (Bloom 1980:
118). For Straussians, texts should therefore move their readers morally. They should
be read in the mode of direct address. Such a reading combats the ‘impoverishment
of the world of experience’ (Bloom 1980: 129).
In summary, the first wave of the history of political theory saw a crisis of relativ-
ism and nihilism generated by modern philosophy, historicism, and natural science.
Genuine history is a moral enterprise, committed to the text and recovering its ori-
ginal intentions, as a source for potential ahistorical universal and foundational truths
about the ‘human condition’, which can act as a groundwork for addressing the sense
of crisis. This first wave rose in the 1950s and submerged in the 1960s. Apart from
the believers, not many could really take Strauss’ conception of apocalyptic crisis very
seriously, although some adherents have continued with its central themes till the
close of the twentieth century.
Thesecondwave developed in the 1970s and declined slowly in the 1990s—although
still retaining powerful institutional allegiances to the present day.^28 This second wave,
if anything, was committed to something like Strauss’s detested historicism. It is often
termed ‘revisionist history’ or the ‘new history’. Its main proponents were Quentin
Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, with a very large number of camp followers. Skinner
has been probably the more consistently influential of the two. The background
influences were R. G. Collingwood, Wilhelm Dilthey, J. L. Austin, H. P. Grice, and
John Searle, in other words, an interweaving of Idealism, hermeneutics, and linguistic
philosophy. In Pocock’s case, Oakeshott and Kuhn were also significant influences,
although in subsequent years, the Kuhnian notion of paradigms waned (see Pocock
in Pagden (ed.) 1987: 21). Pocock and Skinner also differed on the basic detail of their
methodological ideas. However, the underlying unity of the second wave was focused
on an outright rejection of the ‘purported’ history of political theory tradition up to
the 1970s. Authors such as John Plamenatz, C. B. Macpherson, and George Sabine,
who furnished popular texts on the history of political theory up to the 1970s, were
rejected by the new history writings as both theoretically wrong and obsolete.^29 There
was also a dismissal of the Namierite idea that all political theory,per se, was cant.
Political theorywasimportant to the new history writers, although it was never quite
clear why.
What characterizes this second wave? In the case of Skinner, there are a number of
key concerns, which can be divided up in terms of positive appraisals of what should be
done, and negative judgements of what had been wrong in previous histories. The first
focuses on the necessity of recovering authorial intentions, the second on the criticism
of perennial problems. On the positive side, the goal is to understand the meaning
of texts as they were understood in their time. On the negative side, an attempt is
made to characterize the discipline of the history of theory more narrowly in order
to obliterate superfluous purposes. Basically, a historian of political theory cannot
argue for something, which the participants themselves could not have understood or
uttered. Thinkingandcommunicatingareregardedassociallyspecificactivities. Thus,