For the world beyond Cambridge, the association of Cambridge historians with political thought, and in particular the history of political thought, dates from the 1960s and 1970s. It was then that a series of methodological interventions and scholarly studies established what quickly became known as ‘the Cambridge School’. The leading figures in this new movement were Quentin Skinner and John Dunn, both of whom had graduated in History at Cambridge in 1962; and they were joined in observers’ minds by John G. A. Pocock, who had studied for his PhD at Cambridge between 1948 and 1952, and returned for further periods as a research fellow between 1956 and 1958 and as a visiting fellow in 1969. In fact, the formation of the ‘School’ was by no means the beginning of the association between political thought and history at Cambridge: the connection had been integral to the Historical Tripos from its inception in 1875. Nor were the methodological and scholarly concerns of the ‘School’ without roots in the teaching and research of earlier generations of Cambridge historians. Nevertheless, the moment when Cambridge History’s interest in political thought became an internationally recognised phenomenon was decisive for the Faculty’s present reputation as a centre for the study of the history of political thought and intellectual history more generally.
Political Philosophy, Political Science, and History 1875-1931
How to think about politics was a question central to the undergraduate Historical Tripos from the beginning. This was not because politics was regarded as an exclusively historical subject, but because its study was considered central to the purpose of an education in the Humanities. Taught as ‘History and Political Philosophy’, then ‘Moral and Political Philosophy’, with lectures by Henry Sidgwick, the subject was already present in the Moral Sciences Tripos inaugurated in 1860. When a separate Historical Trips was established in 1875, it included a compulsory paper in ‘Principles of Political Philosophy and General Jurisprudence’, succeeded in 1886 by one in ‘Political Science’. In 1899 the subject was expanded into two papers, offered respectively in Part I and Part II of the Tripos, ‘Comparative Politics’ and ‘Deductive Politics’, though their titles reverted to ‘Political Science A’ and ‘Political Science B’ in 1911. As the initial designations implied, the first paper had an empirical character with a focus on political institutions, while the second was a paper in political philosophy, taught through a selection of texts. The impetus to teach politics as Political Science came from J. R. Seeley, the first Regius Professor of History (1869-95), who believed that it was History’s purpose to provide the evidential basis for Political Science, and the Tripos’s pedagogical purpose was to equip the future rulers of the United Kingdom and its Empire with political understanding. (Collini, 1983; Alexander, 2002 and 2016; ODNB, ‘Seeley’, ‘Sidgwick’.)
Even so, the tendency to treat political thinking historically was strong from the first. It was evident in the reading prescribed for the early papers in Political Philosophy or Political Science, which included Henry Maine, Ancient Law (1861), J. C. Bluntschli, The Theory of the State (1885), J.R. Seeley, Introduction to Political Science (1896), and Henry Sidgwick, The Development of the European Polity (1903). The Bluntschli text was a translation of the first volume of the Swiss political thinker’s Lehre vom modernen staat (1875),made by Oxford tutors for use in the new Oxford School of Modern History; Seeley’s and Sidgwick’s texts were published from their lectures. The first to lecture specifically on ‘History of Political Theories’ was J. N. Figgis. He was also the first to recognise the scholarly potential of the field, in ground-breaking studies of The Divine Right of Kings (1896) and Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius 1414-1625 (1907), respectively a critical account of the early development of the theory of sovereignty and a series of studies of the constitutionalism which opposed that theory. (Collini, 1983; Goldie, 1994; Runciman, 1997; ODNB, ‘Figgis’.)
The pressure to adopt an historical approach to political thought was enhanced by differences within the Faculty between adherents of the broader vision of History held by Seeley and his successor as Regius Professor, Lord Acton, and the Rankeans, headed by Mandell Creighton and F.W. Maitland, for whom History should be taught as an empirical discipline, without theoretical pretensions. Maitland’s role here was ironic, for he was of course decisively to shape an approach to the history of law as an intellectual exercise, and through his engagement with the jurisprudence of Otto von Gierke, to make a major contribution to the history of political thought. But that irony was matched by another. It might seem that it was Seeley’s vision of a ‘Political Science’ that triumphed when the University agreed to the endowment of a Chair in Political Science by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial fund, the Chair to be held in the History Faculty. The first holder, Ernest Barker, was appointed in 1927. But Barker, previously at Oxford, was no believer in ‘Political Science’ as Seeley understood it, and under his aegis the Tripos papers in ‘Political Science’ became, in 1931, ‘History of Political Thought’ and ‘The Theory of the Modern State’. The former was taught from a canon of past texts, the latter from a selection of texts in recent and contemporary political philosophy and theory. (Collini, 1983; Alexander, 2002 and 2016; ODNB, ‘Maitland’.)
The History of Political Thought 1931-c.1960
Holding the Chair until 1939, Barker himself combined interests in the history of political thought and political theory. His principal contributions to the former were Political Thought in England 1848-1914 (1928),a biography of Aristotle with a study of the Politics (1931), and a translation, following Maitland’s Political Theories of the Middle Age (1900), of further sections of Gierke’s work on the German Law of Association, under the title Natural Law and the Theory of Society (1934). Barker’s lectures ranged from Aristotle, through ‘Political Thought in England and North America’ in the later eighteenth century to ‘Problems’ and ‘Principles’ of politics. As significant in shaping understanding of the relation between politics and history in the 1930s were two other Cambridge figures, Herbert Butterfield and Michael Oakeshott. A Fellow and subsequently Master of Peterhouse, Butterfield was an historian and a committed Christian famous for his critique of the teleological character of Whig history: consistent with this, he emphasised discontinuity in the history of ideas, not least in English political and legal thinking. Oakeshott was a Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College from 1925 until 1942, but is usually thought of as a political philosopher. He lectured on the ‘philosophical approach’ or ‘philosophical background’ to politics, and on utilitarianism and idealism. But as early as 1924 he had called for the first Political Science paper to be explicitly about the history of political thought, the change implemented in 1931. Alongside Barker, he maintained an interest in the history of political thought, and in later writings he would offer a sweeping account of the history of the theory of the state in terms derived from Maitland and Gierke. More generally, his conviction that political thinking was integral to political practice, leading to an account of politics as traditions of learned behaviour, appealed to historians among his audiences and readers, and encouraged an intellectual approach to political history. Oakeshott’s impact continued to be felt into the 1950s, after he had left Cambridge for Oxford and the LSE, through his continuing editorship of The Cambridge Journal (1947-54). (Alexander, 2002 and 2016; Oakeshott, 1924; ODNB, ‘Butterfield’, ‘Oakeshott’.)
After World War II, the Tripos papers continued in the form established in 1931, except that in 1951 the Part II paper became ‘Theories of the Modern State’. Lectures for both papers were given by Barker’s successors as Professors of Political Science, D. W. Brogan (1939-68) and W.B. Gallie (1968-78), and by a range of Faculty and College Lecturers; those for the ‘History of Political Thought’ now tended to have a more obvious period focus. Substantive preparation of undergraduates for the Tripos Examinations took place in weekly supervisions, conducted by a wider range of – mainly college – supervisors. Supervisions can be assumed to have been the primary focus of most undergraduates’ engagement with the subject, and it was here that the prescribed texts came into their own pedagogically, as primary sources and bodies of argument which could be discussed and interpreted jointly by student and supervisor.
The 1950s were not a good decade generally for political philosophy, whose identity and purpose seemed threatened by analytic philosophy on the one hand and empirical political science on the other. Though holding the chair in Political Science, Denis Brogan put his considerable energies into other fields (notably French and American history). Others in Cambridge, however, were beginning to make significant new contributions to the historical study of political thought. Four stand out. Walter Ullmann was an Austrian refugee who was befriended in Cambridge on his arrival in England in 1938. He returned as a University Lecturer in 1949, and lectured thereafter on medieval political thought. Having trained as a lawyer in Austria, his first scholarly contributions were to the study of Civil and Canon Law. At Cambridge his major publications were The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (1955) and Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (1966). The latter contained the fullest statement of the thesis for which he is best known, that medieval political thought could be analysed in terms of ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ theories of government. But the detail of his scholarship belied the simplicity of this distinction. An exacting supervisor of undergraduates and graduate students, he ensured a future for the history of medieval political thought. (Watt, 1988.)
Returning from a particularly hard-fought war, Duncan Forbes became a Fellow of Clare in 1947 and subsequently a University Lecturer. His first publication was a prize essay on The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (1952). Though on a Butterfieldian subject, the work was perhaps as significant as a pioneering study of the early nineteenth-century reception of the historical philosophy of Giambattista Vico and as a response to Friedrich Meinecke’s conception of ‘Historicism’. The engagement with Meinecke continued to underlie Forbes’s subsequent, major contribution to scholarship on David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (1975). An idiosyncratic and inspiring lecturer, Forbes covered eighteenth and nineteenth-century political thinkers, most memorably Hegel, whose ‘Introduction’ to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History he in turn introduced for a Cambridge translation (1975). He also created a Special Subject on ‘Hume, Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment’, which would be taken by leading figures in the next generation, including John Dunn, Quentin Skinner and Nicholas Phillipson. A reluctant supervisor of graduates, Forbes was nonetheless an inspiration to those who took up his thesis that there was a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, among them Phillipson, John Burrow, Donald Winch, István Hont and John Robertson. (Burrow, 2001; James, 2012.)
By contrast, the contribution of Peter Laslett, a Fellow of Trinity and University Lecturer, to the history of political thought lay not in his own publications, but in two editorial achievements. His editions of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha and other Political Works (1949) and of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1960) revolutionised scholarship on both texts by establishing that they had been composed well before their actual publication: Patriarcha, finally published in 1680 but composed in the 1630s, the Two Treatises published in 1689, but composed c. 1681. Consequently, Laslett argued, understanding of either work must start from the circumstances in which they were written and the issues they were addressing. The Two Treatises were not a celebration of the Revolution of 1688, but an ‘Exclusion tract’, a justification for the forcible exclusion of James, Duke of York, from the succession to the crown. Laslett also collaborated with W. G. Runciman and others in editing five collections of essays, Politics, Philosophy and Society (1956-79), designed to address the perceived crisis in political philosophy. In the course of the 1960s Laslett would switch fields completely, and take the lead in another Cambridge speciality, the history of population and social structure. Until then, however, he contributed lecture series on both Ancient and Early Modern political thinkers and on contemporary philosophy and political theory, as well as supervising graduate students, among the last of whom was John Dunn. (Alexander, 2002; ODNB, ‘Laslett’)
Perhaps most consequential was Laslett’s impact on John Pocock, who remembered the edition of Patriarcha as jolting him into realising that political thought must be studied in its historical contexts. Pocock had begun research for a doctoral thesis on later seventeenth-century legal and political thought under the supervision of Butterfield in 1948. The resulting monograph, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), took up Butterfield’s intuition of the disruptive significance of scholarship on the feudal law for English Common Law, and transformed its implications for the understanding of English legal and constitutional thinking. (James, 2019, with Pocock’s response; Robertson, 2019.)
A fourth figure who belongs with this generation, but was late to secure a teaching position in Cambridge, was Maurice Cowling. Invited to be a Fellow of Peterhouse by Butterfield in 1963, when he was also appointed a University Lecturer, Cowling elaborated a self-consciously Christian vision of history and political thought in the vein of Butterfield – what James Alexander has characterised as a ‘political theology’. His first books were critical accounts of The Nature and Limits of Political Science and Mill and Liberalism (both 1963). Thereafter he turned to detailed studies of nineteenth and twentieth-century high politics, before returning to intellectual history with the three-volume Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (1980-2001). Cowling was active in teaching the history of political thought and in reform of the papers into the 1980s, but the power of his intellectual presence was concentrated in Peterhouse. (Alexander, 2016; ODNB, ‘Cowling’.)
A ‘Cambridge School’? The ‘Methodology War’ of the 1960s and 1970s
Important as the achievements of those post-War scholars were, their impact was individual, felt in their respective fields. There was no wider recognition that together they represented a specifically Cambridge initiative in scholarship, still less an aspiration to transform the self-understanding of historians of political thought. That was the achievement of the next generation of historians of political thought, headed by Quentin Skinner and John Dunn, and afforced from outside by John Pocock. Their success, moreover, was not simply a reflection of the quality of their scholarship, but owed at least as much to a methodological intervention which connected the history of political thought to a broader trend in contemporary philosophy, literary criticism and the Humanities – the ‘Linguistic Turn’.
Two articles by Pocock, both published in 1962, served as prolegomena. The first, ‘The history of political thought: a methodological enquiry’, articulated the conceptual issues raised by Pocock’s 1957 monograph, and as Samuel James suggested, may have owed more than Pocock acknowledged to Oakeshott. But it was also founded on a conception of language that derived ultimately from Wittgenstein, who had suggested that language be understood as a plural phenomenon, as a set of ‘language games’. Each language had its own rules or conventions, whose sufficient mutual acceptance was essential for communication, but which left room for variation and innovation. Pocock took this to be indicative for languages of politics, each of which would have its criteria of validation. The same proposition underlay his second article, ‘The origins of the study of the past’, which pointed to his particular preoccupation with the politics of historiography. It was Skinner’s more polemical methodological articles, however, which attracted most attention. These began with ‘The limits of historical explanations’ (1966), and reached a crescendo in ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’ (1969), which proved to be his most discussed intervention, although he subsequently refined his thinking in several more papers in the 1970s. Skinner acknowledged the inspiration of Collingwood (no follower of Wittgenstein) for the principle that understanding any statement required knowledge of the question it was answering. But statements themselves Skinner understood in terms derived from the Oxford philosopher of language J. L. Austin’s How to do things with Words (1962), as ‘speech acts’ whose meanings can only be grasped by appreciating what the words are ‘doing’. Skinner’s contributions were reinforced by another from John Dunn, ‘The identity of the history of ideas’ (1968), which drove home their joint conviction that unhistorical study of past texts was pointless: they could only be understood by historical enquiry. (James, 2012 and 2019; Pocock, 1962a and 1962b; Skinner, 1966 and 1969; Dunn, 1968.)
From these interventions it was clear what the new generation of Cambridge historians of political thought were against. First and most simply, they were against the belief that what the texts of past political thinkers ‘said’ could be read directly off the page, without reference to historical circumstances or linguistic usage – an approach they identified as the ‘Oxford’ way of doing things. Relatedly, they opposed any supposition that the texts of the past ‘talked’ to each other and to ‘us’ across the centuries, their assumptions and arguments sufficiently similar to be accessible to predecessors and successors alike. Facing in another direction, they also opposed historical outlooks which treated ideas simply as the epiphenomena of an underlying ‘reality’: whether the Marxist proposition that ideas be understood primarily as the ideological expression of class interests, exemplified by C. B. Macpherson’s study of ‘possessive individualism’, or the narrowly political ‘realism’ of Lewis Namier and Geoffrey Elton, for whom ideas were at best a cover for personal ambition, at worst an incitement to fanaticism. (James, 2012.)
In place of these mistaken approaches, the focus of the new methodology was on what thinkers were ‘doing’ in their texts. What mattered was the active use of words, which in turn entailed a focus, not on individual concepts, but on arguments, on the way that concepts were associated together in ‘languages’ of thought. This was to be established contextually, by examining how the words were used in the historical circumstances of their utterance. The resulting ‘contextual’ approach is often understood in a way that any historian would regard as obvious: that it is essential to establish the setting – political, institutional, social – in which a text was produced in order to establish its author’s intention and the meaning it conveyed. But in the methodological perspective of Pocock and most explicitly Skinner, ‘context’ was not simply what every historian meant by the term. It was (also) more specifically linguistic: the ‘context’ was the set of conventions regulating language use at the time. Linguistic conventions framed what a thinker could ‘do’ in argument. A past thinker might have accepted, adapted, or even sought to break the conventions, but nothing ‘done’ with words was intelligible without knowing what the conventions were. (Brett, 2002; Hamilton-Bleakley, 2006.)
To this Skinner in particular added the Weberian thought that by exploiting linguistic conventions thinkers could argue in ways that ‘legitimised’ preferred courses of action. In this sense language use could be understood as ‘ideology’. This was very different from the Marxist characterisation of ideology as the deliberate or unconscious distortion of the ‘reality’ of class interest. But it also tended to politicise thought by suggesting that the historian should be alert to the interests that a particular use of language might legitimate. Although Skinner addressed himself to ‘the history of ideas’ in general, the implication was that the new methodology was particularly suitable for the study of arguments which were political. (Goldie, 2006; Brett, 2021.)
Whether the common strands in the methodological positions taken by Pocock, Skinner and Dunn were sufficient to constitute a ‘school’ is moot. Neither Skinner nor Dunn claimed to have constituted a ‘school’, and none of their colleagues in History or Politics at Cambridge admitted to belonging to one. But this did not prevent commentators from outside Cambridge claiming to identify one. One who felt able to do so was John Pocock himself. By now in the United States, Pocock was free to promote awareness that something new was stirring in Cambridge, with which he wished to associate himself. Still clearer were a growing number of critics, for whom the term ‘School’ was pejorative. Some thought that their scope to interpret past texts was being unjustifiably restricted by the insistence on studying those texts ‘in context’; others, especially Marxists, that ‘context’ was defined too narrowly, to the exclusion of economic and social forces But of course the outbreak of a ‘methodology war’ in the 1970s only served to make the claims of Skinner, Dunn and Pocock still more widely known, drawing attention to the ‘Cambridge’ approach to the history of political thought across the Anglophone world and beyond, from Finland to Japan. (James, 2019; Tully, 1988.)
Even if it is appropriate to identify the formation of a ‘Cambridge School’ in the history of political thought, it was soon evident that the methodological positions initially staked out could be taken in more than one direction. Pocock, for example, was always more interested in languages or ‘discourses’ of politics, and how these developed and changed across a range of texts. By contrast, Skinner’s preoccupation with doing things with words put the emphasis on authorial agency, narrowing the focus. But it is arguable that Skinner’s thinking evolved, not least due to the stimulus of time spent away from Cambridge at Princeton in the mid-1970s: there he found himself in the company of the philosophers Raymond Geuss and Richard Rorty, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, the social theorist Albert Hirschman, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and the historian Felix Gilbert, who encouraged his increasing interest in Renaissance rhetoric. The preoccupation with the author lessened, and Skinner moved closer to Pocock’s interests in languages. At the beginning of the new millennium, this commitment to a methodology of patterns of language use would be renewed and taken further by Annabel Brett, addressing the question ‘What is intellectual history now?’ (2002). On these methodological terms, moreover, to study the history of political thought was also to do philosophy, opening up the normative choices offered by the past. The link between history and political philosophy was not broken. By contrast, John Dunn’s emphasis on respecting the convictions of an author on their own terms was always accompanied by an assessment of the wider significance of the questions the author was addressing. Such an approach might be given a ‘realist’ cast, particularly if associated with the moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (a Fellow of King’s College from 1967, and its Provost from 1979 to 87) and Raymond Geuss (who moved to Cambridge in 1993). In this perspective, historical context became a critical test of as well as the key to understanding the texts under examination. As a variation of this approach, with echoes of Seeley’s project of a ‘political science’, Richard Bourke suggested that history serve as the basis of political judgement, and as such, an antidote to the claims of morals over politics. (Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner, 1984; Skinner, 1998 and Skinner et. al., 2002; Geuss, 2001; Brett, 2002 and 2021; Bourke, 2009 and 2023; Robertson, 2023.)
These differences helped ensure that the Cambridge historians kept a distance from other continental European manifestations of the ‘linguistic turn’ in intellectual history, both the German pursuit of ‘Begriffsgeschichte’ or ‘conceptual history’ and the ‘archaeological’ investigations of Michel Foucault. Nevertheless, the widespread acceptance that Cambridge historians had transformed understanding of what the history of political thought could claim to achieve cannot be understood unless their interventions are set in that wider context. The ‘Cambridge School’ was the creation of that moment. (Palti, forthcoming 2024.)
New directions in Cambridge scholarship
A similar pattern of common purpose and divergence in outcomes can be seen in the directions taken by the scholarship of this generation of Cambridge historians. The earliest research of both Dunn and Skinner was focussed on the seventeenth century. Dunn turned first to the reception of Locke’s Two Treatises in America (much less important to the American revolution than everyone believed), then to Locke’s political thought in its own right. The finding of The Political Thought of John Locke (1969), that Locke’s politics were integrally bound to his religious commitments as a radical Protestant, revolutionised understanding of his significance: since he was no secular liberal, Locke could not be regarded as the first ‘modern’ political thinker. For his part, Skinner returned to lines of enquiry broached by Figgis, and re-examined Hobbes’s doctrine of sovereign power. Discounting the significance of Christian Natural Law for an understanding of Leviathan, Skinner placed a fresh emphasis on the secular, implicitly modern character of Hobbes’s theory of the state. It was the beginning of a constant pre-occupation with the theory of the state, which provided a major theme of the two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), published in the year Skinner succeeded Gallie in the Chair of Political Science. (James, 2012).
By the time Foundations was published, however, Skinner, alongside Pocock, had complicated the story by offering rival reassessments of Renaissance political thought, and of Machiavelli’s writings and legacy in particular. In Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975), Machiavelli and his fifteenth-century Florentine predecessors were significant as exponents of a revitalised classical concept of republican citizenship. Transferred in the seventeenth century to agrarian England, and in the eighteenth to commercial Britain and America, the Machiavellian concept of the citizen had been deployed against successive threats to reduce politics to social relations. By contrast, Skinner’s Machiavelli was set against an account of the Renaissance going back into the thirteenth century, and made of Machiavelli a theorist of republican, ‘Roman’ liberty against the rising tide of princely ‘despotism’. Outlined in Foundations, the thesis of republican liberty as non-domination was repeatedly tested in lectures and papers until it was formally set out in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History, Liberty before Liberalism (1998). Skinner had not abandoned his conviction that Hobbes’s theory of the state was of lasting value: it would be re-stated in ‘A genealogy of the modern state’ (2009). But the parallel commitment to ‘Roman’ liberty meant that there was no longer a single high road to ‘modern’ political thought. (Robertson, 2019; Skinner, 2009; Lane, 2012.)
By 2000, the directions taken by the work of Cambridge colleagues had multiplied. Ancient political philosophy was studied afresh, with new interpretations of the Stoics by Malcolm Schofield in Classics and of Plato by Melissa Lane in History; likewise of Late Antique and Medieval political thought, and in particular the history of Roman and Canon Law, in studies by Peter Garnsey in Classics and Magnus Ryan in History. In the later medieval and early modern period, Richard Tuck and Annabel Brett brought the traditions of Natural Law and Natural Rights, initially discounted by Skinner, back into focus. Tuck accorded priority to Protestant jurists, Brett to the Catholic ‘Second Scholastic’, but both reaffirmed the salience of these traditions for Hobbes, and their enduring philosophical significance. Catholic natural jurisprudence was also at the heart of Anthony Pagden’s study of the ways in which Spanish theologians and political thinkers constructed the societies of the newly-‘discovered’ peoples of America. Alongside them Mark Goldie dug deeper into the controversial literature of seventeenth-century England, tracking the terms of political argument outwards into imaginative literature as well as into a fresh examination of the thought of Locke.
Study of the eighteenth century, the focus of Duncan Forbes’s scholarship, was given fresh impetus through the King’s College Research Centre project on ‘Political Economy and Society 1750-1850’, initiated in 1978 by John Dunn and Gareth Stedman Jones and directed by István Hont and Michael Ignatieff. A series of conferences incubated the subsequent work of Hont on the preoccupation of Hume, Smith and their Enlightenment contemporaries with the twin themes of rich country–poor country rivalry and ‘jealousy of trade’ as the drivers of international antagonism, beneath which lay the post-Hobbesian, ultimately Kantian problem of ‘unsocial sociability’. Collected in his Jealousy of Trade (2005), Hont’s scholarship was complemented by that of Michael Sonenscher on the French debate over public credit and Sylvana Tomaselli on the place of women in Enlightenment thinking. Connecting the eighteenth with the nineteenth century, Gareth Stedman Jones, who succeeded Skinner in the Chair of Political Science in 1997, brought together political economy, early socialism and radical Christianity in studies of Languages of Class (1994), Hegel and the Young Hegelians, and the life and thought of Karl Marx.
More new directions were taken after 2000. After Machiavelli, Pocock had turned his attention to Edward Gibbon, leading to a six-volume study, Barbarism and Religion (1999-2015) which explored the varied historiographic contexts of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Forbes aside, however, the politics of historiography has been of lesser interest to Cambridge historians. By contrast, intellectual history at a remove from the history of political thought has gradually gained ground, to cover the broader history of knowledge, including the history of philosophy, of scholarship, of literature, and of natural science – although in the case of the last, still at an institutional distance from colleagues in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science. Richard Serjeantson and Michael Edwards asked fresh questions of early modern philosophy. Scott Mandelbrote undertook intensive work on Newton’s manuscripts, and was also among the first to study early modern Biblical scholarship, putting Cambridge at the head of this growing field. Clare Jackson has explored the religious, political and literary culture of late seventeenth-century Scotland; Emma Spary the intellectual and cultural history of botany and food in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France; and Jessica Patterson eighteenth-century British accounts of Indian Hindu culture. Drawing on the history of Biblical scholarship in particular, John Robertson (appointed to the Chair in 2010, when its title was belatedly changed from ‘Political Science’ to ‘the History of Political Thought’) began to thread together study of Enlightenment, sacred history, and political thought across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Finally, the hitherto understudied frontier of Cambridge history of political thought, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has begun to receive sustained attention. It had never been completely neglected. Apart from Cowling and Stedman Jones, Stefan Collini, who returned to Cambridge from Sussex in 1986, produced a succession of studies of British intellectual life across the two centuries. Another to return, from the US in 2001, was Michael O’Brien, who had pioneered investigation into the pre-Civil War intellectual history of the southern states, scholarship which culminated in Conjectures of Order. Intellectual life and the American South 1810-1860 (2004). But the pace and volume of research into these centuries picked up sharply in the 2010s, supported by a succession of appointments in the period. Richard Bourke, who succeeded Robertson in the Chair in 2018, followed his earlier monograph on Edmund Burke with a study of Hegel. Chris Meckstroth likewise published a monograph on Hegel, and Fernanda Gallo worked on his Italian reception. In the twentieth century, Joel Isaac demonstrated what was at stake in the history of American social science, and Peter Mandler contributed an iconoclastic study of Margaret Mead and the fate of her anthropology. They have been followed by Waseem Yaqoob, working on the trajectory of German political thought in the twentieth century, Mira Siegelberg on international political thought, and Emma Stone Mackinnon on Human Rights. Among those with posts in Politics, David Runciman studied the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘pluralists’ (including Maitland, Figgis and Barker) who reacted against the Hobbesian theory of the unitary ‘person’ of the state. Duncan Bell explored the range of British international thinking in the same period. Duncan Kelly followed his study of ‘the propriety of liberty’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a project on the ‘intellectual consequences’ of World War I, while after a monograph on early modern Stoic political thinking Christopher Brooke has turned to the modern history of distributive theory. Tom Hopkins continues the legacy of Hont and Stedman Jones in studying French political economy and socialism in the early nineteenth century.
New scholarship has continued to be generated through supervision of growing numbers of doctoral students. Quentin Skinner was an active supervisor from the 1970s until he left Cambridge for London in 2008, with James Tully, Mark Goldie and Karen Kupperman among his earliest students. Belying the assumed existence of a ‘School’, however, only a minority of recent and current Faculty postholders obtained their doctorates in Cambridge. Holders of Cambridge PhDs in the field are to be found in History, Politics and other departments across the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the United States and the southern hemisphere. In those different contexts they have been prompted to explore still other dimensions of political thought, not least, as in the cases of Tully and Kupperman, colonial encounters with indigenous peoples. Skinner’s successors in the chair, Stedman Jones, Robertson and Bourke, along with Hont, Goldie and Brett, have likewise been active supervisors of later generations of students, whose number now ensures that the responsibility is shared across all Faculty and tenured college postholders in the subject.
The contribution of the Cambridge University Press
An invaluable role in developing Cambridge’s reputation in the history of political thought has been played by the Cambridge University Press. Besides publishing individual works by John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and many others, the Press introduced a number of series designed to support scholarship and teaching in the field. The first, evoking the original characterisation of the field, was Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics, with Maurice Cowling, G. R. Elton, E. Kedourie, J. R. Pole and Walter Ullmann as editors. The series published both monographs, beginning with Cowling’s 1967 study of the politics of the 1867 Reform Bill, and texts, including selections from works by Russian Marxists, English republicans, Herder, Kant and Hegel.
Several new series followed Skinner’s return to Cambridge to take up the chair in 1978, each involving his active collaboration with editors at the Press, successively Jeremy Mynott, Richard Fisher, and Elizabeth Friend-Smith. Ideas in Context (the title preferred to Richard Rorty’s suggestion of Philosophy in Context)was to be a monograph series, though it began with two signal collected volumes, Philosophy in History, edited by Rorty, Skinner and J. B. Schneewind (1984), and Virtue, Commerce, and History, by John Pocock (1985). Under the editorship of Skinner and James Tully the series published some 100 titles, before they handed over in 2010 to David Armitage, Jennifer Pitts, Richard Bourke and (until retirement) John Robertson; by 2023, the number of titles had passed 130. By contrast, a second series, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, aimed to support teaching of the subject, but to do so on the principle of publishing complete texts, not selections (although that principle was later breached). The first texts were published in 1988, with Skinner, Geuss and Tuck (until he left for Harvard) as series editors. The early presence of major texts by Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, along with Laslett’s edition of Locke’s Two Treatises, was essential to the commercial success of the project, but a determined effort was made to enlarge the established ‘canon’, and by 2012 as many as 115 titles had been published. Recently the series has been re-launched, and Skinner has been joined by an enlarged editorial board, with the remit of identifying and publishing translations of ‘non-Western’ texts. (Fisher, 2009)
Two more series were for invited lectures. Inaugurated in 1994, the J.R. Seeley Lectures owed their existence to a collaboration between Skinner and Richard Fisher, by which the Press funded the lectures in return for their publication. In this case the primary subject was political philosophy, a reminder that Cambridge’s interest in political thought and history went beyond the history of political thought narrowly defined. The first Seeley Lectures were given by James Tully; recent lecturers have included Anne Phillips, Josiah Ober, Axel Honneth and Elias Palti. The second initiative was taken by Quentin Skinner himself, when he generously donated the prize money he received from the award in 2006 of the Balzan Prize in Political Thought to endow the Balzan-Skinner Lecture in Modern Intellectual History. The Lecture (which became the Quentin Skinner Lecture in 2017) is given by an early career scholar within ten years of completing their PhD., with encouragement to publish in The Historical Journal. The first Lecturer was Hannah Dawson in 2010, the most recent, in 2023, Katrina Forrester.
The University Press also publishes two journals important to the field: The Historical Journal, edited for a time by Mark Goldie, and Modern Intellectual History, whose first issue appeared in 2004, and of which Duncan Kelly is the longest-serving editor. Both have published outstanding work in the history of political thought by graduate students and post-doctoral fellows as well as by Faculty postholders, and Modern Intellectual History in particular has taken the initiative to promote a global approach to its field.
Teaching the History of Political Thought 1975-2024: the Tripos papers and the M.Phil.
Changes to the teaching of the history of political thought that reflect and harness these developments have occurred at regular intervals since the 1970s. At undergraduate level, the Tripos Part I paper in the History of Political thought was divided into two in 1975, with 1750 (later 1700) as the dividing date, while in Part II ‘Theories of the Modern State’ became ‘Political Philosophy’. Just over twenty years later, in 1997, the Part II paper yielded to historical pressure, and became ‘Political Philosophy and the History of Political Thought from c.1890’, the date now also being the terminus of the second Part I paper. Most recently the Tripos reform inaugurated in 2022 has seen the two Part I papers located in the new Part IB, and the opportunity taken to revise their content. The papers continue to be divided into sections on authors and on topics, a combination which has made it possible both to expand the ‘canon’ of texts and to group texts to enable the exploration of topics such as Islamic political thought, slavery, gender, and animals and the environment before 1700, and Enlightenment, revolutions, and empire between 1700 and 1890. The papers have been taken by large numbers of historians, and increasingly also by undergraduates studying Politics within the Human, Social and Political Sciences Tripos. (Alexander, 2002)
The texts themselves have remained the pedagogical focus of supervisions, but student reading is expected to be informed by – and examined upon – the accompanying weekly lectures. Until recently these were offered in remarkable numbers: in 2000-2001 a total of 18 sets of lectures (152 in all) for the Part I paper to 1700 and 16 (138 in all) for the paper from 1700 to 1890. The lectures have usually been supplemented by a Part II Special Subject in the field, which has served as a proving ground for future graduate students. After 2010 broader changes to the character of the Tripos created pressure to match lectures more exactly to the content of the papers, and to reduce both; offsetting this, a new paper, ‘States between states: international political thought from the Roman Empire to the early nineteenth century’, was added to Part II. Lecture provision continues to be agreed by the Political Thought and Intellectual History Subject Group of the History Faculty; unusually, postholders in Politics as well as History are members of the Subject Group, reflecting the weight of increasing numbers of students from Politics taking the papers, supplemented since 2016 by those taking the Joint Tripos in History and Politics. But able History students continue to be attracted to the papers, even when their main interests lie elsewhere: the benefit of engaging with texts of high intellectual quality is still well-recognised.
To teaching for the Tripos papers was added, in 1994, a new Master’s programme, the M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History. A nine-month degree, the M.Phil. is examined on essays and a dissertation; individual supervision for these is combined with classes in reading texts, in topical themes, and in method. Much of the preparatory work for the programme was done by István Hont and Anthony Pagden, and the programme continues to be led by postholders in History, but supervisors are drawn from across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Cohorts rose from an initial 8-12 to 25-35 in the 2010s, before settling around 20. While a proportion have progressed from the Tripos, the majority of M.Phil. students come from elsewhere, many from the United States. The growth was matched by a marked shift in student interests: in the 2010s as many as a half were writing on twentieth century topics – in modern British, continental European (especially German), North American and international political and social thought. As many as a quarter might go on to a PhD at Cambridge, although diminished UK funding has limited opportunities. Others have returned to their national university systems to undertake a doctorate, while a sizeable portion of U.S. students return to Law School, Yale a favoured destination. The effect has been to create something like a ‘club’ of M.Phil. alumni world-wide, diffusing knowledge of the ‘Cambridge’ approach to the history of political thought and intellectual history more generally. At the same time, the size of M.Phil. cohorts has helped to sustain the numbers of postholders in the field within History. By 2020 there were once again six History Faculty postholders in the history of political thought, with, for the first time, an equal gender balance.
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The very success of the M.Phil. in sustaining and diffusing Cambridge’s reputation in the field of the history of political thought has also, of course, helped to level the field. Not only does the programme now have imitators in the U.K., in London, St Andrews and Oxford; overseas, former M.Phil. students are promoting the history of political thought in their own countries and institutions. But more fundamental challenges to the place of political thought in History are visible too. One is the disciplinary separation of Politics from History, and the location – in the United States the increasing concentration – of the history of political thought within departments of Politics or Government. Another is the fragmentation of History itself, as the fields of enquiry multiply, and material, cultural and global history become more prominent in degree programmes. The history of political thought can continue to flourish in its niche at Cambridge, where the weekly Seminar and a succession of recent conferences, co-ordinated under the aegis of the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought, are testimony to the vitality of the community of postholders, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. But retaining Cambridge’s standing in the field is likely to depend on a continued willingness to respond to the ‘pull of the political’ within all of History: to recognise the role politics plays in every sphere of human activity, and the persistence and ingenuity with which humans have thought about the political in all its dimensions and implications. The importance acquired by the history of political thought within Cambridge History reflects the centrality of politics to human existence: as the founders of the Faculty and Tripos recognised, political thought and the study of history are bound together.
Acknowledgement
In composing this account, I have been particularly indebted to the research of James Alexander, Stefan Collini, Mark Goldie and Samuel James, whose contributions are identified with an asterisk in the following list of references. I am also grateful for comments and information from James Alexander, Richard Bourke, Annabel Brett, Mark Goldie, Samuel James and Quentin Skinner.
References
*Alexander, James, (2002): ‘Philosophy, Politics and History in Cambridge c.1875 to c.1975, Part I’ (unpublished paper, 2002)
(2016): ‘The Cambridge School, c. 1875-c.1975’, History of Political Thought, 37:2 (2016), 360-86
Bourke, Richard, (2009), ‘Theory and practice: the revolution in political judgement’, in Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss, eds., Political Judgement. Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge, 2009), 73-109
(2023) Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton, 2023), ‘Conclusion’
Brett, Annabel (2002): ‘What is Intellectual History now?’, in David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (London, 2002), 113-31
(2021): ‘Between history, politics and law: history of political thought and history of international law’, in Annabel Brett, Megan Donaldson and Martti Koskenniemi, eds., History, Politics, Law. Thinking through the International (Cambridge, 2021), 19-48
Burrow, J. W. (2001): ‘Duncan Forbes and the history of ideas: an introduction to “Aesthetic thoughts on doing the history of ideas”’, History of European Ideas, 27 (2001), 97-99
*Collini, Stefan, (1983): ‘A place in the syllabus: Political Science at Cambridge’, in Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics. A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983), 339-63
Dunn, John (1968): ‘The identity of the history of ideas’, Philosophy 43 (1968), 85-104
Fisher, Richard (2009), ‘“How to do things with books”. Quentin Skinner and the dissemination of ideas’, History of European Ideas 35 (2009), 276-80
Geuss, Raymond (2001): History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge, 2001)
*Goldie, Mark, (1994): ‘J. N. Figgis and the history of political thought in Cambridge’, in Richard Mason, ed., Cambridge Minds (Cambridge, 1994), 177-92
(2006): ‘The context of The Foundations’, in Annabel Brett and James Tully, eds., with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley, Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), 3-19
Hamilton-Bleakley, Holly, (2006): ‘Linguistic Philosophy and The Foundations’, in Brett and Tully, eds, with Hamilton-Bleakley, Rethinking The Foundations (2006) 20-33
*James, Samuel, (2012): ‘The “Cambridge School” in the History of Political Thought, 1948-1979’, University of Cambridge PhD Thesis, 2012
(2019): ‘J. G. A. Pocock and the idea of the “Cambridge School” in the history of political thought’, History of European Ideas 45:1 (2019), 83-98; with ‘A response’ by Pocock, ibid, 99-103, and ‘A rejoinder’ by James, ibid 45:3 (2019), 465-67
Lane, Melissa, (2012): ‘Doing our own thinking for ourselves: on Quentin Skinner’s genealogical turn’, Journal of the History of Ideas 73:1 (2012), 71-82
Oakeshott, Michael, (2004): ‘The Cambridge school of Political Science’ (1924), in What is History? And other Essays (Exeter, 2004)
ODNB: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online (2004-): articles on Henry Sidgwick, J. R. Seeley, J. N. Figgis, Herbert Butterfield, Michael Oakeshott, Peter Laslett, and Maurice Cowling.
Palti, Elias (forthcoming 2024): Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (Cambridge, forthcoming: 2024)
Pocock, J. G. A., (1962a): ‘The history of political thought: a methodological enquiry’, in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2 nd Series (Oxford, 1962), 183-202
(1962b): ‘The origins of study of the past: a comparative approach’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 4:2 (1962), 209-46 [Both articles reprinted without revision in J. G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History. Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge, 2009).]
Robertson, John, (2019): ‘John Pocock’s histories of political thought’, Storia della Storiografia/History of Historiography 75:1 (2019), 11-46
(2023), ed.: Time, History, and Political Thought (Cambridge, 2023), ‘Introduction’
Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J. B., and Skinner, Quentin, eds, (1984): Philosophy in History. Essays on the historiography of philosophy (Cambridge, 1984)
Runciman, David, (1997): Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge, 1997)
Skinner, Quentin (1966): ‘The limits of historical explanations’, Philosophy 41 (1966),
(1969): ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’, History and Theory 8:1 (1969), 3-53; reprinted in: Tully (1988)
(1998): Interview, recorded in 1998 and published by Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, The New History. Confessions and Conversations (Cambridge, 2002), 21-40
(2009): ‘A genealogy of the modern state’, Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009), 325-70
Skinner, Quentin, et al, (2002): ‘Political philosophy: the view from Cambridge’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 10:1 (2002), 1-19
Tully, James, ed., (1988): Meaning and Context. Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1988)
Watt, J. A., (1988): ‘Walter Ullmann 1910-1983’, Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988), 483-509
Note: Books whose title and date of publication are identified in the text of the article are not further referenced. For the publications of current and retired Cambridge historians of political thought identified in this article, and of those who have moved to posts elsewhere, see their individual web-pages within the websites of their Faculty or Department.
History Faculty and other post-holders identified in the article, by date of appointment:
Henry Sidgwick, Fellow, Lecturer, Trinity College, 1867-1900, and Professor of Moral Philosophy 1883-1900
J. R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History 1869-95
Frederic William Maitland, Reader in Law, 1884, Downing Professor 1888-1906
John, Lord Acton, Regius Professor of Modern History 1895-1902
J. N. Figgis, Lecturer and Fellow, St Catherine’s College 1896-1919
Herbert Butterfield, Fellow of Peterhouse 1923-1979 (Master 1955-68), Professor of Modern History 1944, Regius Professor 1963-68
Michael Oakeshott, Fellow in History, Gonville and Caius College 1925-1949 (afterwards, Oxford; LSE)
Ernest Barker, Fellow of Peterhouse, Professor of Political Science, 1927-1939
D. W. Brogan, Fellow of Peterhouse, Professor of Political Science, 1939-1968
Duncan Forbes, Fellow of Clare 1947-94, University Lecturer, later Reader in the History of Modern Political Thought
Peter Laslett. Research Fellow of St John’s College, 1948; Fellow of Trinity College and University Lecturer, later Reader, in History 1953-83
Walter Ullmann, Fellow of Trinity College, University Lecturer in History 1949, Professor of Medieval History 1972-78
Maurice Cowling, Fellow, Jesus College, c.1951-53, 1960-63, University Lecturer, later Reader in History 1961-88, Fellow of Peterhouse 1963-93
J. G. A. Pocock, Research Fellow of St John’s College, 1956-58 (afterwards, Canterbury, NZ; Washington, St Louis and Johns Hopkins, Baltimore USA)
Quentin Skinner, Fellow of Christ’s College, 1962-; University Lecturer in History 1967-78; Professor of Political Science 1978-1996; Regius Professor of Modern History 1996-2008 (afterwards, Queen Mary, London)
John Dunn, Fellow of King’s College 1966-; University Lecturer, then Reader in Political Science 1972-87, Professor of Political Theory, 1987-2007
Bernard Williams, Fellow of King’s College 1967-79, Provost 1979-87, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy 1967-87 (afterwards Berkeley; Oxford)
W. B. Gallie, Fellow of Peterhouse, Professor of Political Science, 1968-1978
Malcolm Schofield, Fellow of St John’s College, University Lecturer, Reader, Professor of Ancient Philosophy (Classics) 1972-2009
Richard Tuck, Fellow of Jesus College, University Lecturer, then Reader in Political Theory 1973-1995 (afterwards Harvard)
Peter Garnsey, Fellow of Jesus College, 1974-; Professor of the History of Classical Antiquity (Classics) 1997-2006
Gareth Stedman Jones, Fellow of King’s College, 1974-; University Lecturer, then Reader in the History of Social Thought 1979-97, Professor of Political Science 1997-2010 (afterwards Queen Mary, London)
István Hont, Senior Research Fellow of King’s College 1978-84, Fellow 1989-2013; University Lecturer in History, then Reader in Political Thought 1989-2013
Mark Goldie, Fellow of Churchill College, 1979-; University Lecturer, Reader and Professor of Intellectual History, 1993-2019
Anthony Pagden, Fellow of Girton and then of King’s College, University Lecturer, then Reader in Intellectual History 1980-1997 (afterwards Johns Hopkins, Baltimore; UCLA USA)
Stefan Collini, Fellow of Clare Hall, University Lecturer, then Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature (English) 1986-2014
Michael Sonenscher, Fellow in History, King’s College 1988-2014
Raymond Geuss, University Lecturer, then Professor of Philosophy 1993-2014
Melissa Lane, Fellow of King’s College, University Lecturer in Ancient Political Thought and Political Philosophy 1994-2009 (afterwards Princeton)
Annabel Brett, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, University Lecturer, then Reader in the History of Political Thought 1996-2020, Professor of Political Thought and History 2020-
David Runciman, sometime Fellow of Trinity College, then of Trinity Hall, University Lecturer in Politics 1998-2014, Professor of Politics, (Politics and International Studies) 2014-
Scott Mandelbrote, Fellow in History, Peterhouse 1998-
Clare Jackson, Fellow in History, Trinity Hall 2000-; University Honorary Professor of Early Modern History, 2023-
Peter Mandler, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, University Lecturer, then Professor of Modern Cultural History, 2001-
Michael O’Brien, Fellow of Jesus College, University Lecturer, Reader, then Professor of American Intellectual History 2001-2015
Richard Serjeantson, Fellow in History, Trinity College 2001-
Sylvana Tomaselli, Fellow in History and Politics, St John’s College 2004-
Duncan Bell, Fellow of Christ’s College, 2004-8, 2010-, University Lecturer in International Relations 2005-8, 2010-19, Professor of Political Thought and International Relations, (Politics and International Studies) 2019-
Magnus Ryan, Fellow of Peterhouse, University Lecturer in Medieval Political Thought, 2006-
Duncan Kelly, Fellow of Jesus College and University Lecturer, 2007-, Professor of Political Thought and Intellectual History, (Politics and International Studies) 2018-
Christopher Brooke, Fellow of King’s College, then Homerton College, University Lecturer in Political Theory, (Politics and International Studies) 2009-12, 2014-
Michael Edwards, Fellow in History, Jesus College 2009-
John Robertson, Fellow of Clare College, Professor of the History of Political Thought 2010-2018
Emma Spary, Fellow of Corpus Christi College 2010-, University Lecturer, Reader, now Professor of the History of Modern Knowledge
Joel Isaac, Fellow of Christ’s College, University Lecturer in the History of Modern Political Thought 2011-2017 (afterwards Chicago)
Chris Meckstroth, University Lecturer, now Associate Professor in the History of Political Thought 2013-
Tom Hopkins, Senior Teaching Associate, Department of Politics and International Relations 2015-
Waseem Yaqoob, Lecturer in Modern Political Thought 2016-2019
Richard Bourke, Fellow of King’s College, Professor of the History of Political Thought, 2018-
Mira Siegelberg, Fellow of King’s College, Associate Professor in the History of International Political Thought 2019-
Emma Stone Mackinnon, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Assistant Professor in the History of Modern Political Thought 2019-
Fernanda Gallo, Fellow of Homerton College, Associate Professor in nineteenth-century Mediterranean History 2019-
Jessica Patterson, Lecturer in the History of Modern Political Thought 2019-22, Fellow in History, Magdalene College 2022-23, then Trinity College, 2023-