the Wrst place, we should suppose the theorist to be carrying out a pro-
gramme of theoretical enquiry, possessing its own discipline and means of
validating the statements it advances; this will enable us to juxtapose the
theorist’s propositions with those put forward by the historian, and enquire
into any meeting or collision that may appear between them. In the second
place—and here it is hard to avoid placing an additional burden on the
theorist—we must suppose that the two actors are studying the same text,
which has not been written by the theorist but by some other agent at some
point in history. It is hard, although in principle not impossible, to imagine
the historian studying a text written by a contemporary theorist as if it were a
historical phenomenon. Historians are typically concerned with the past; they
let time go by, during which evidence may assemble and perspectives emerge
and alter. But once we suppose the theorist to be engaged with a text written
by another hand, and itself a historical document, we must ask why this is
happening, and what role a text written by another and—the historian
instantly adds—in another context plays in the self-discipline and self-valid-
ating enterprise we have supposed the theorist to be conducting. The answer
to our questions may emerge in literary and almost serendipitous terms. The
theorist has, for whatever reason, read the historic text andWnds its language
to serve the purpose of some enterprise in political theory being conducted in
the present; the language of the text is therefore presented as a proposition to
be evaluated in the terms and by the criteria of the present enterprise. The
historian now appears, asking questions and making statements concerning
the intentions of the text’s author and the meaning (a two-faced term) of his
words in the context or contexts he and they occupied in history. In what
ways, if any, will the propositions advanced by theorist and historian aYrm or
deny one another?
The theorist may assert that the author in the past was engaged in a
programme of political theorizing identical with, or very closely resembling,
that being conducted by the theorist in the present; so that the author’s
language may be quoted, cited, or paraphrased as language employed in the
theorist’s enterprise. The historian will scrutinize this assertion. We will
suppose her or him capable of understanding a programme of political
theory conducted in the present, as well as of reconstructing the languages
in which programs of a similar kind have been conducted in past historical
contexts. Such a historian will therefore be capable of pronouncing the
theorist’s assertion valid or invalid. If the former, the past author’s language
can be employed in the present theorist’s enterprise without doing violence to
170 j. g. a. pocock