An Historicist Critique of "Revisionist" Methods for Studying the History of Ideas

What are the correct procedures to adopt in the attempt to arrive at an understanding of past work of philosophy or political thought? In the last decade or so traditional approaches to the history of have been subjected to severe and fundamental criticism by handful of scholars who, while not agreeing on all particulars, generally laud one another's work, depict themselves as methodological innovators, and constitute what we might loosely call revisionist within the field of intellectual history. The nucleus of this school -Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and John Dunn -all complain about the lack of historicity in the treatment of linguistic artifacts from the past. Their bete noire is the prevalent notion that the whole point of studying great works of philosophy is to extract the timeless elements or dateless ideas with universal (and therefore contemporary) application. In striving to appropriate the classical texts to the present, the orthodox historians of ideas, it is contended, have generated both mistaken empirical claims and conceptual confusion; they have ignored the uniquely historical question of what the various thinkers intended to say and have, instead, deployed interpretative techniques which are not properly historical. As an alternative, say the revisionists, it is necessary to develop a truly autonomous method, one which offers means of treating the phenomena of political thought strictly as historical phenomena and since history is about things happening even as historical events: as things happening in context which defines the kind of events they were.' In essence the alternative urges