We Have a Firm Foundation 77
history provided the most consistent moral panorama able to satisfy a variety of intellectual,
emotional, and aesthetic needs’ see Soffer 1994: 3. The development of history in Britain
naturally coincided with the creation of the Dictionary of National Biography, the English
Historical Review, Historical Association, and the Public Records Office.
- The only exception was the adoption of a Whiggish evolutionary teleology which fitted well
with the idea of the gradual growth of the British constitution and national life. The study
of history thus ‘remained a national narrative about high politics and the constitution’,
(Soffer 1994: 42).
- As one scholar has remarked ’the history of political thought arose at a time when history
itself as a discipline in England had not firmly become an established identity. Indeed aca-
demic history which freed itself from classical studies was very weak in English universities
until late in the nineteenth century’, Boucher (1991: 29).
- Quentin Skinner, despite all the earnest methodological arguments, has shown a clear
willingness to use historical resources for present doctrinal disputes. His attachment to
civic republicanism is a clear example.
- As Strauss commented, ‘The kind of political philosophy, which was originated by Socrates
is called classical political philosophy, until the emergence of modern political philosophy
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Modern political philosophy came into being
through the conscious break with principles established by Socrates’, see Cropsey and
Strauss (1987: 2).
- The initial feverish character of the method debates in the 1980s have dampened down
and now become much more institutionalized in weighty book series.
- There are distinct approaches in Sabine, Macpherson, and Plamenatz. Sabine is more
overtly committed to perennial issues, which have an ultimate moral dimension. Plamenatz
wanted to analyse the perennial arguments and concepts of various ‘philosophies of man’,
Plamenatz (1963: xiv–xv). Macpherson was committed to a Marxist form of analysis.
- Another writer in the same methodological school—David Wootton—has observed,
approvingly, that ‘many contextualizing studies serve in effect to distance us from the
past’, see Wootton (1993: 9).
- Another dimension of denying perennial problems and over-committing oneself to contex-
tual history is creating a developed incapacity to theorize. As Richard Ashcraft comments
‘some of the responsibility for the divorce of tradition political theory from the present
concerns of political life rest squarely with those teachers of political theory who have
encapsulated the meaning of politics within the frozen worlds of “analysis” or “history” ’,
Ashcraft (1975: 19).
- As Boucher comments ‘Skinner’s predilection for searching for origins disposes him to
employ many of the historical devices associated with the mythology of doctrines, but the
same preoccupation also has a tendency to generate the mythology of prolepsis’, Boucher
(1984: 298).
- TheBegriffgeschichteargument is discussed again in Chapter 3.
- As James Farr comments, ‘Like the Scots, the American founders explicitly and repeatedly
used the very terms to pick out this nascent science. Thereafter, these terms—science of
politics, political science, science of government, science of legislation, and their kin—would
help reshape American political discourse and indeed the very institutions and practice of
American political life’. During the revolution period of the 1780s and 1790s, the rhetoric
of ‘political science’ was utilized by all participants, although its precise ‘identity’ was never
