Petri Koikkalainen | University of Lapland (original) (raw)

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Papers by Petri Koikkalainen

History of Political Thought, Dec 31, 2008

Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 2002

The SAGE Handbook of Governance, 2011

Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought, 2013

Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2015

A central purpose of historicist contextualism, or the “new history of political thought”, the ce... more A central purpose of historicist contextualism, or the “new history of political thought”, the central methodological ideas of which were laid out between the 1950s and the 70s, was to liberate the history of ideas from distorting influence of political ideology, nationalism, and other presentist narratives that ascribed past events under false teleologies. From the 1980s onwards, it has been possible to find explicitly normative statements in the works of the leading contextualist historians and scholars influenced by their work, for example, Skinner’s defences of neo-Roman republicanism. This article examines the normative content of contextualism. Instead of arguing that the normative aspect was a novelty introduced after the 1980s, the claim here is that contextualist theorising was socially and politically implicated and arguably normative from its very beginning. To substantiate this, the article offers an interpretation of the normativity of early contextualism based on its r...

University of Lapland Press, Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis 81. , 2005

"The rise of logical positivism and the post-war disillusionment with political ideologies during... more "The rise of logical positivism and the post-war disillusionment with political ideologies during the 1950’s produced an apparent crisis in normative political philosophy. According to Peter Laslett’s famous declaration in 1956, ‘for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead’. Laslett’s declaration, which is understood as an articulation of a dilemma that concerned the possibilities of
finding a theoretically or philosophically relevant approach to politics, forms the starting point of this study. Parallel problems were faced by many of Laslett’s contemporaries. Among the most
important of them were that political philosophy no longer appeared to be a credible normative authority with regard to contemporary political problems, and that its connection with the tradition of past philosophy that had been its main repository of ideas was broken. Thus, the crisis of normative theory soon led to a re-evaluation of the past classics of political philosophy.
The aim of this study is to examine the emergence of a ‘new political philosophy’, as exemplified by John Rawls, and a ‘new history of political thought’, as exemplified by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, as gradually developing answers to dilemmas that were faced by Laslett and his contemporaries. Due to renewed interest, normative and historical studies of political philosophy appeared to have entered an almost golden age by the 1970’s. The appearance of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 has frequently been referred to as the key event that made political philosophy meaningful again. The new history of political thought took shape at around the same time and provided theoretically ambitious answers to questions that concerned the roles of past thinkers in present-day contexts, as well as to questions concerning the proper historiographical methods of approaching past thinkers.
The focus of analysis stems from discussions that took place in and around the seminal series Philosophy, Politics and Society, at first edited by Laslett himself (PPS I, 1956), and later in co-operation with W. G. Runciman (II–IV, 1962–72), Skinner (IV) and James Fishkin (V, 1979). PPS attempted to provide a wide coverage of contemporary political philosophy, and it was a significant arena for discussing the present condition and future opportunities of the field. Contributions to the debate are studied as responses to the problems first expressed during the
1950’s, and then further developed and greatly modified by numerous authors.
The analysis reveals, for example, that the origins of ‘new political philosophy’ were conceptually and contextually different from those of the ‘new history of political thought’. Thus it would be historically inaccurate to conclude that the Rawlsian model of political theory would have emerged as a result of the ‘death of political philosophy’ debate. However, the origins of the ‘new history of political thought’ were remarkably close to PPS in terms of personal and philosophical influence. If a single ‘result’ of the death of political philosophy discussion has to be mentioned, then it would be the emergence of the new history of political thought during the late 1960’s and 1970’s.

Keywords: Political philosophy, political theory, history of political thought, history of ideas, methodology

History of European Ideas, 2011

This article traces the development of contextualist methodology in the study of the history of p... more This article traces the development of contextualist methodology in the study of the history of political thought/political theory after WWII. It argues that the so-called ‘Cambridge School’, often regarded as the core of historicist contextualism, arose during the 1950s and 1960s in response to dilemmas that were largely internal to (the history of) political philosophy as it was practiced in Britain in an academic culture dominated by analytic philosophy. This first stage of contextualist theorizing, usually associated with Laslett, Skinner and Pocock, was highly influential, but it also contributed to the formation of a new set of problems. These were connected to the diversification and internationalization of the historicist contextualist study of political thought after the 1960s. The ‘second stage’ of contextualist theorizing was shaped by post-analytic and post-modernist impulses among others. Because of the variety of philosophical and conceptual commitments on notions central to the field such as ‘political thinking’, ‘politics’, or ‘power’, it is unlikely that the present historicist contextualist approaches would come to share a unified methodology or theory of historical interpretation.