The Cambridge School and Leo Strauss: Texts and Context of American Political Science (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Cambridge School, c. 1875 to c. 1975 (History of Political Thought, 2016)
The 'Cambridge School' is a term associated with some historians of political thought who since the 1960s have claimed to have something to say of contemporary relevance about politics. Here it is argued that the School has to be understood as a long consequence of Seeley's determination at the foundation of the Historical Tripos in the 1870s to relate history and politics to each other. For a century almost all the major figures in Cambridge agreed that history and politics should be related, but disagreed about how to do it. The writings and others are studied here in order to indicate how the historians of the Cambridge School for a century attempted to relate history and politics in not one but four ways-through political science, the history of political thought, political philosophy and political theology.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2000
Traditionally the domain of scientists, the history of science became an independent field of inquiry only in the twentieth century and mostly after the Second World War. This process of emancipation was accompanied by a historiographical departure from previous, ‘scientistic’ practices, a transformation often attributed to influences from sociology, philosophy and history. Similarly, the liberal humanists who controlled the Cambridge History of Science Committee after 1945 emphasized that their contribution lay in the special expertise they, as trained historians, brought to the venture. However, the scientists who had founded the Committee in the 1930s had already advocated a sophisticated contextual approach: innovation in the history of science thus clearly came also from within the ranks of scientists who practised in the field. Moreover, unlike their scientist predecessors on the Cambridge Committee, the liberal humanists supported a positivistic protocol that has since been criticized for its failure to properly contextualize early modern science. Lastly, while celebrating the rise of modern science as an international achievement, the liberal humanists also emphasized the peculiar Englishness of the phenomenon. In this respect, too, their outlook had much in common with the practices from which they attempted to distance their project.
Contemporary British History, 2016
Reviews and Short Notices General Must We Divide History into Periods? By Jacques Le Goff. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Columbia University Press. 2015. xiv + 160pp. £20.00. Jacques Le Goff's slight book contains a big idea. Tackling head on both generally established ideas of periodization and specifically the place of the Renaissance within this, he argues vigorously for a critical pause and a rethink. Le Goff, well known the other side of the Channel and central to the Annales School, built his career on recasting understandings of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Working across themes of time, trade, work, intellectual life, urban culture and religious experience he did much to enrich our understanding of the Middle Ages. For years Le Goff argued for the dynamism, complexity and sophistication of the Middle Ages, with past work explicitly locating the construction of a medieval Europe within the context of early twenty-first century preoccupations with 'European-ness' (see his The Birth of Europe, 2006). Beginning with an exploration of ideas of chronology, eras and periods, in this book he usefully reminds us that conventions such as dating from the birth of Christ and historians' use of centuries to stand for certain ideas and trends both are part of a longer history of historians trying to organize the past, and continue to serve to make the past manageable and understandable. Indeed, he makes it plain that 'there is nothing neutral or innocent, about cutting up time into smaller parts' (p. 2). Through discussing, for example, early Christian fathers' attempts at constructing both a chronology and a meaningful periodization, he serves to historicize our own present-day conceptions of history as charting rapid change and of 'progress'. In contrast, from St Augustine until the fourteenth century, there prevailed a sense in which 'the world grows old', and that Christendom was marking time until the second coming of Christ. Acknowledging that people in the past understood time, history and their own place in history on very different terms from our own is a crucial tool for understanding and reconstructing past world-views. All this is simply a prelude to his larger concern, that of resituating and reinterpreting the relationship between the Renaissance and modernity. Rather than standing for the beginning of a new era the Renaissance was the last incarnation of a world we would think of as medieval, forming part of a 'long Middle Ages' extending up to the mid-eighteenth century. Since Michelet and Burckhardt, the idea of the Renaissance as marking the beginning of the early modern period has been a commonplace, and it still provides the organizing logic for vast swathes of undergraduate programmes.
Setting up a discipline, II: British history of science and “the end of ideology”, 1931–1948
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2004
For the history of science the 1940s were a transformative decade, when salient scholars like Herbert Butterfield or Alexandre Koyré set out to shape postwar culture by promoting new standards for understanding science. Some years ago I placed these developments in a tradition of enduring arts-science tensions and the contemporary notion that previous, ''scientistic'', historical practices needed to be confronted with disinterested codes of historical craft . Here, I want to further explore the ideological dimensions of the processes through which the academic study of science became institutionalized. Butterfield's generation of science historians moulded perception of science in highly specific ways. Whereas the scientist-historians of the 1930s put scientific innovation into its socio-economic contexts, postwar accounts portrayed the birth of modern science as an intellectual revolution. Anti-Marxism formed a defining feature of the process by which the image of scientific work as a disinterested journey of the mind came to be institutionalized. Rather than spelling the end of ideology, appointments processes in the early Cold War years reveal disagreement about what science was to be invariably coextensive with dissent about social and political order. Rather than testifying to irreconcilable conflicts between interestedness and historical craft, the work of both the 1930s and 40s speaks of surprisingly productive relations between the two. #
Recent tendencies in the history of political thought
History of European Ideas, 2011
The University of Cambridge has long been a centre for the teaching of the history of political thought. 1 In 1873, to meet concerns that the study of history alone might ''exercise too exclusively the memory and receptive imagination of the student'' (at the expense of the higher faculties of abstraction and generalisation), the new Historical Tripos included a number of ''theoretical'' courses taken over from the longer-established degree in Moral Sciences. 2 Among these was a paper in ''Principles of Political Philosophy and General Jurisprudence'', for which undergraduates read a fairly miscellaneous selection of ten books, from Aristotle's Politics to Maine's Ancient Law via François Guizot, John Stuart Mill, and John Austin. 3 True to the purpose of the paper, these books were read for direct political and philosophical illumination rather than as episodes in intellectual history. 4 It was indeed the view of a series of Cambridge historians in the later nineteenth century-most notably Sir John Seeley and Oscar Browning-that the study of history was properly understood as a foundation for a political science, and that (in Browning's words) ''the Tripos ought to some extent.. .be regarded as a Political Tripos.'' 5 In this conception, Browning was fighting a losing battle even at the end of the nineteenth century, and today the question of how to supplement the learning of history so as to borrow a degree of intellectual rigour from elsewhere has long lost its point. 6 (Nobody now doubts that history is a proper university subject, and accusations of objectionable novelty and intellectual flimsiness have found new targets.) It was a sign of the times when in 1929 ''Political Science A''-essentially a course in the comparative study of political institutions-was replaced by a paper on ''The History of Political Thought''. 7 Political philosophy, originally included in the Tripos as an intellectually bracing addition to mere historical erudition, was now to be treated as itself part of the history to be studied. 8 This approach informed pioneering work by J.G.A. Pocock and Peter Laslett in the 1950s, and theoretical manifestos by Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner in the following decade. 9 Since then, Cambridge has been associated with a distinctive way of studying the history of political thought, in which surviving texts are assigned to past contexts of political circumstance and intellectual practice in order to make possible the recovery of those texts' character as specific ''speech acts'' performed by historical agents. 10 It is an irony that this ''genuinely historical'' view of the history of political thought (to use Quentin Skinner's expression) has its origins in the inclusion of consciously nonhistorical subjects in the Cambridge Historical Tripos. 11 Between undergraduate education and the production of original historical research lies the training of graduate students, and at the graduate level the ''Cambridge School'' has had a pedagogical as well as a scholarly dimension from the outset. 12 It is a sign of the continuing vitality of graduate work in the history of political thought in Cambridge that since 2008 graduate students History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 396-402
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015
Reviews and Short Notices General Must We Divide History into Periods? By Jacques Le Goff. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Columbia University Press. 2015. xiv + 160pp. £20.00. Jacques Le Goff's slight book contains a big idea. Tackling head on both generally established ideas of periodization and specifically the place of the Renaissance within this, he argues vigorously for a critical pause and a rethink. Le Goff, well known the other side of the Channel and central to the Annales School, built his career on recasting understandings of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Working across themes of time, trade, work, intellectual life, urban culture and religious experience he did much to enrich our understanding of the Middle Ages. For years Le Goff argued for the dynamism, complexity and sophistication of the Middle Ages, with past work explicitly locating the construction of a medieval Europe within the context of early twenty-first century preoccupations with 'European-ness' (see his The Birth of Europe, 2006). Beginning with an exploration of ideas of chronology, eras and periods, in this book he usefully reminds us that conventions such as dating from the birth of Christ and historians' use of centuries to stand for certain ideas and trends both are part of a longer history of historians trying to organize the past, and continue to serve to make the past manageable and understandable. Indeed, he makes it plain that 'there is nothing neutral or innocent, about cutting up time into smaller parts' (p. 2). Through discussing, for example, early Christian fathers' attempts at constructing both a chronology and a meaningful periodization, he serves to historicize our own present-day conceptions of history as charting rapid change and of 'progress'. In contrast, from St Augustine until the fourteenth century, there prevailed a sense in which 'the world grows old', and that Christendom was marking time until the second coming of Christ. Acknowledging that people in the past understood time, history and their own place in history on very different terms from our own is a crucial tool for understanding and reconstructing past world-views. All this is simply a prelude to his larger concern, that of resituating and reinterpreting the relationship between the Renaissance and modernity. Rather than standing for the beginning of a new era the Renaissance was the last incarnation of a world we would think of as medieval, forming part of a 'long Middle Ages' extending up to the mid-eighteenth century. Since Michelet and Burckhardt, the idea of the Renaissance as marking the beginning of the early modern period has been a commonplace, and it still provides the organizing logic for vast swathes of undergraduate programmes.
One. A History of Political Science: How? What? Why?
Modern Political Science, 2009
BRITISH AND AMERICAN political scientists recently have shown an un usual degree of interest in the history of their discipline. The dawn of a new millennium prompted leading figures in the British study of politics to reflect on their past and to situate themselves in relation to it. 1 In America, work on the history of political science has appeared off and on for some time, but the last decade has witnessed a positive flourishing of such studies. These studies include some in which luminaries in the disci pline look back on their teachers and predecessors. 2 They also include a distinct subgenre of historical studies written from within the discipline, but by scholars outside its limelight. 3 The past of political science has attracted further attention recently from intellectual historians outside of the discipline in both Britain and America. 4 Modern Political Science