Political Thought as Traditionary Action: The Critical Response to Skinner and Pocock

Nimium altercando veritas amittitur-in excessive disputation truth is lost. The current debate within theory over the methodological and historiographical work of Quentin Skinner and J. G. A Pocock sadly demonstrates the wisdom of this aphorism. In order to defend their own philosophical positions, critics ascribe to Skinner and Pocock the already well-identified errors of established positions, in violation of the wider intentions and spirit of Skinner's and Pocock's work.' A central concern for Skinner and Pocock over the past twenty years or so has been to define more clearly the way in which the history of thought should be understood if its claim to represent actual historical processes of transmission, development, or change is to be taken seriously. Skinner, in particular, has produced a detailed critique of the various styles of the history of thought prevalent until recently and still reflected in the textbooks prescribed for courses on the history of ideas taught to undergraduates.2 He has proposed a subtler understanding of a text as a speech act whose is recoverable only by situating the author's intentions in writing within a context of conventions. Pocock's approach also relies upon linguistic terminology, except that where Skinner takes as his starting point authorial intentions, Pocock begins more capaciously in taking as his primary category a political language and its transmission and transformation over time. Combining their concerns and extending them for purposes of my own, I argue for a refinement in the concept of tradition (which vexes everyone working in the history of ideas), and an emphasis instead upon what, at some risk of being thought to be indulging an affectation, I call traditionary action.