The Stumbling Blocks of Contextualism: Presentism and Antiquarianism
EVGENY ROSHCHIN
Introduction
More than ten years ago David Runciman pointed to the triumphant victory of
‘contextualism’ in the history of political thought, which had been confirmed by the decades
of research first stimulated by the great methodological disputes and controversies over
linguistic action and the role of context in the 1960s-1970s. At that time the reputation of this
approach was already so strong that, as Runciman noted, serious questions about its methods
were no longer raised.1 The discipline of International Relations (IR) lagged behind political
theory in debating the ways of accommodating intellectual history in its political and research
agenda.2 Nevertheless, as David Armitage observes, we are now living through the
renaissance in the studies of history of international political thought. 3 Most of the key
contributions to this burgeoning literature, as well as on disciplinary history of IR, are faithful
to the premises of contextualism, such as those by Armitage,4 Richard Tuck,5 Beate Jahn,6
Edward Keene7 and Duncan Bell.8 One of the key sources of methodological inspiration for
David Runciman, ‘History of Political Thought: The State of the Discipline’, British Journal of Politics and
International Relations, 3:1 (2001), pp. 84-7.
2
For an example of raising the problem of history and disciplinary history in IR see contributions to a Special
forum on the role of history in IR in Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37: 2 (2008); and Geoffrey
Roberts, ‘History, Theory and the Narrative Turn in IR’, Review of International Studies, 32:4 (2006), pp. 70314.
3
David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2013), p. 24.
4
In addition to Armitage 2013, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
5
Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to
Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; repr. 2009).
6
Beate Jahn (ed.), Classical Theory in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
7
See his Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); International Political Thought: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2005); ‘The Development of the Concept of International Society: An Essay on Political Argument
in International Relations Theory’, in Beverly Neufeld and Michi Ebata (eds.) Confronting the Political:
International Relations at the Millennium (London: Macmillan Press, 2001), pp. 17-46.
8
Duncan Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth
Century Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). In addition to these monographs,
there is a number of research articles in various IR journals that identify themselves as contextualist and
rhetorical studies, e.g. Casper Sylvest, ‘Interwar Internationalism, the British Labour Party, and the
1
1
many of these works is the approach practiced by a number of scholars labelled collectively
as a ‘Cambridge school’ and more specifically by Quentin Skinner.9
The exponents of contextualist approach in IR enthusiastically endorsed its original
aims of fighting anachronistic, ‘presentist’ and, thus, distorted and mythological accounts of
classical political thought necessitated by the needs of the present-day theory.10 Instead of
prevailing tendency to build such teleological accounts of history and universal historical
laws, they advocated historicist reading of past concepts and arguments in their own context,
which reveals the degrees of contingency and particularity that not only undermine the
legitimacy of mainstream canons (i.e. realism, liberalism and the English School), but
possibly also their accounts of universal rules of social conduct.11 For this reason
commentators noted the efficacy of Skinner’s approach for the reconstruction of the politics
of disciplinary history highlighting the ways in which arguments are sidelined and concepts
redescribed as a result of political choices made by the contributors to the debate.12
The growing popularity of contextualist approach to the study of history of
international political thought contributes to concurrently growing anxiety about the problems
that it presumably bears. Contextualist studies in IR seem to take for granted the overall
orientation of Skinner’s approach and omit the problematic formulation of the tasks contained
therein. Namely, what remains problematic is the relation of such research to the present. One
part of the overall problem stems from the understanding of context as comprising numerous
historically distant texts engaging in debate with each other according to certain rules and
belonging to a specific social milieu.13 For some the turn to context as an exogenous factor
explaining disciplinary history in itself might be distorting as it is likely to ‘participate in the
Historiography of International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 48:2 (2004), p. 414; Christopher
Hobson, ‘Beyond the End of History: The Need for a ‘Radical Historicisation’ of Democracy in International
Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37:3 (2009), pp. 637-9; Evgeny Roshchin, ‘(Un)Natural
and Contractual International Society: A Conceptual Inquiry’, European Journal of International Relations 19:2
(2013), pp. 257-279; Ian Hall, ‘Power Politics and Appeasement: Political Realism in British International
Thought, c.1935-1955’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 8 (2006), pp. 175-6.
9
See a collection of his essays on method in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. 1: Regarding Method
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). I shall not discuss in this article the project of
Begriffsgeschichte because my argument will emphasize rhetorical contestation and genealogical orientation of
the history of concepts.
10
Beate Jahn, ‘Classical Theory and International Relations in Context’, Beate Jahn (ed.), Classical Theory, pp.
6-16.
11
See Keene, International Political Thought, pp. 4-5.
12
See Duncan S.A. Bell, ‘Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique’, Alternatives: Global, Local,
Political, 27:3 (2002), p. 330; Duncan S.A. Bell, ‘Political Theory and the Functions of Intellectual History: A
Response to Emmanuel Navon’, Review of International Studies, 29 (2003), pp. 157-8.
13
For this reason Kari Palonen defines Skinner’s approach as ‘pointilist’ history, see his Quentin Skinner:
History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 179.
2
presentist agenda of legitimation and critique and, in one way or another, reinforce the
conventional image of the field’s history in terms of successive idealist, realist, and
behavioral phases’.14
This is a common misunderstanding of contextualist interpretations. Skinner’s
approach, for instance, explicitly rejects the possibility of explaining historical texts by
reference to their social context and confines its analysis to speech-acts and their
conventions.15 Nor does this approach prioritise meaning over action. As Skinner always
emphasises, the task of the history of speech-acts is to place them within the broader debate in
order to see what the authors might have been doing, instead of identifying what they thought
they were doing.16 Any claims about the author’s intentions can only have the status of
hypothesis, ‘for which we can hope to assemble a great deal of evidence’ 17 by contrasting it
with the relevant context. Skinner admits that this task is accomplished by establishing
intertextuality among the scrutinized works.18 Thus, by establishing the relations to other texts
and arguments we can hypothesise about the intentions and actions of an author.19
However, for the sceptics the study of such context potentially bears little, if any,
implications to ‘broader’ questions of social science and the present-day concerns that IR
seeks to address, at the same time provoking fear of lapsing into historical relativism.20
Therefore, some critics in IR are tempted to present contextualist methods as one out of many
tools that help to formulate ‘big’ questions for comparative studies or even to portray
14
Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 33-7. This suggestion is not totally misplaced
because even among contextualists arguments are made for the inclusion of relevant political contexts into
analysis see James Farr, ‘Understanding Conceptual Change Politically’, in Terrence Ball et al. (eds) Political
Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 41. Moreover, such
supporters of contextualism in IR as Duncan Bell argue that more inclusive approaches embracing institutions
and networks fit better for the study of disciplinary history, see his ‘Writing the World: Disciplinary History and
Beyond’, International Affairs 85 (2009): 10–12.
15
Bell, ‘Language, Legitimacy’, p. 331; Gerard Holden, ‘Who Contextualizes the Contextualizers? Disciplinary
History and the Discourse about IR Discourse’, Review of International Studies 28 (2002), p. 261; Skinner,
Visions of Politics, Vol. 1: Regarding Method.
16
Quentin Skinner, ‘Is It Still Possible to Interpret Texts?’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 89 (2008),
p. 654.
17
Ibid., p. 653.
18
Ibid., p. 652. Currently, establishing intertextuality seems to be an accepted solution. For instance, Holden
seems to believe that context can be identified with sufficient accuracy (Holden, ‘Who Contextualizes the
Contextualizers?’, p. 263), which however looks like a much too assured a conclusion as contexts always elude
identification by multiplying.
19
Bell, ‘Language, Legitimacy’, p. 331
20
For the argument on the study of concepts as the province of political theory and the difference in scope with
social science see Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), p. 40.
3
constructivist philosophy of history as ‘Skinnerian’.21 This is, however, to underappreciate the
claim that language is not a neutral reservoir of information but in itself a tool of framing and
making politics and, thus, the history of arguments and concepts can be an independent and
legitimate field of study.22
The other part of the problem consists in the paradox of presentism permeating the
contextualist studies and reflections upon them. As mentioned above, one of the key tasks of
contextualism is to challenge ‘ahistoricist’ canons of established traditions of thought or
historical mythologies tailored to legitimise present-day discourses.23 Paradoxically, the
advocates of the Skinnerian contextualism are likely to commit the presentist fallacy
themselves were they prepared to simply adopt Skinner’s linguistic and rhetorical approach.
Armitage in a self-critical reflection over the development of ‘international intellectual
history’ noted a possibility of ‘presentism’ in such studies,24 i.e. a bias in selecting the
fragments of historical material under the pressure of the present-day concerns. I shall argue
that the problem of presentism and the identity of the ‘concept’ may be recognised already in
Skinner’s early works on the use of language and can be traced in his later rhetorical and
genealogical investigation of concepts. I also argue that the solution to this problem may be
found in reformulation of research tasks that have been presented in contextualist IR studies
as well as in Skinner’s recent rhetorical and genealogical essays.
Such contextualist challenging by means of historicisation leaves the epistemological
status of the challenger unclear and may replace one sort of presentism with another.
Moreover, it is unclear how discovered contingency of a certain argument or concept, which
can only belong to a specific historical episode, can be utilised in contemporary debates. In
fact, if contextualist research were only meant to destabilise traditions by showing
contingency of their constitutive elements, it would certainly generate fear of having one’s
research pigeonholed as only having an antiquarian value and with little relevance to current
debates. Skinner himself contributes to the proliferation of this anxiety, when he famously
proclaims in Liberty before Liberalism that he leaves the reader to ‘ruminate’ on the
Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Reading History through Constructivist Eyes’, Millennium: Journal of International
Studies, 37:2 (2008), p. 400; see also Christian Reus-Smit, ‘The Idea of History and History with Ideas’, in
Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson (eds) Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 120-40. For the critique of such labeling see Ben Holland, ‘Sovereignty
as Dominium? Reconstructing the Constructivist Roman Law Thesis’, International Studies Quarterly, 54
(2010), p. 456, fn 18.
22
Kari Palonen, ‘The History of Concepts as a Style of Political Theorizing: Quentin Skinner’s and Reinhart
Koselleck’s Subversion of Normative Theory’, European Journal of Political Theory, I:1 (2002), pp. 91-106.
23
Skinner, Visions, Vol. I, p. 59. See also Keene, International Political Thought, pp. 14-21
24
Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought, p.30-1.
21
4
perspective on liberty recovered in his research.25 I argue that the concern with relevance and
the problem of presentism can be effectively addressed, if not sorted out entirely, by further
elaboration of the functions of ‘contestation’ and ‘debunking’ that his turn to genealogy
sought to perform. Skinner himself might not be prepared to accept the type of debunking
expected from genealogical investigations, but without recognition of this function and the
clarification of scholar’s role in constructing a genealogical narrative the contextualist IR
studies remain a usual suspect.
The paradox of presentism
Critics took issue with Skinner’s conception of the concept and the position of subject who is
to determine the identity of the concept. Melvin Richter pointed out that, despite the
epistemological primacy of the historical context in the Skinnerian approach, his categories of
analysis are ‘phrased in the terms of present-day analytical philosophy of language rather than
those theories of language held by past thinkers’.26 This is a serious criticism for a type of
research that attempts to understand concepts-in-use. Richter further develops this point by
showing another potentially burdensome problem in taking-up the Wittgensteinian dictum
that concepts are tools, for, as he observes, it is not obvious how one ‘could write the history
of the uses of a concept in argument without having taken a position on the identity of the
concept’. He continues by resolutely dismissing the disclaimer that the meaning is in the use
for the simple reason that a scholar needs certain means to differentiate between similar
concepts in the same linguistic context.27 Indeed, if the primary units of analysis in the
Skinnerian type of contextualism are specific terms used in specific arguments, then, in order
to draw any conclusions as to the trajectory of and changes in a concept, a researcher has to
make an extra analytical effort to construct a concept out of the words used in a text. Skinner
in a sense confirms this conclusion by arguing against equating words and concepts.28
However, such a distinction grants a detached position to the scholar who must construct
concepts out of words-in-use. These second-order constructs are not the same as concepts-inuse, for even the authors under scrutiny do not always identify and delimit the concepts they
use for the convenience of an interpreter. This ‘privileged’ position by virtue of its mere
25
Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 118.
Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 132.
27
Ibid., p.134.
28
Skinner, Visions, Vol. I, p. 159.
26
5
existence creates a window of opportunity for smuggling a ‘presentist’ bias into historical
interpretation.29
Jens Bartelson’s critique is based on similar premises. He specifically argues that
Skinner’s approach entails a ‘suprahistorical vantage point’ in relation to truth in past texts.
He illustrates this point by referring to Skinner’s statement about Jean Bodin’s belief in
‘witches in league with the devil’ as false,30 while a steadfast contextualist would insist on
making an opposite claim – on the existence of mermaids and demons – insofar as
corresponding terms are literally and rationally used in the discourse of the time. Skinner in
this respect does not trust his sources and judges them from the contemporary perspective on
being and criteria of real, thus in principle permitting a degree of presentist arbitrariness.31
This criticism, probably, is not entirely justified because, as Skinner later shows by picking
again the example of beliefs in witches this time by the French peasantry, it is inadequate to
dismiss these as delusory or as expressions of something else. Rather, it is worthwhile to
discover the range of other beliefs that make such beliefs rational. 32 Despite building his
criticism on a possibly unfortunate example, Bartelson still detects a principle that determines
the detached position of the scholar in relation to the language of sources.
These criticisms should be taken seriously as they bear upon the basic ontological and
methodological postulates of the contextualist research programme, and particularly to the
formulation of research questions. At the stage of formulating a research question it is hard to
find unequivocal safeguards against the presentist fallacy, because the object of study is
conceived from the perspective of present and the researcher has a preconception of what she
will be looking into. Furthermore, given that the current understanding of a concept is
naturally expressed in the modern lexicon, a scholar has to be clear about whether the presentday words and terms are going to be the guiding lights in the search of this concept in the
past. For such a light might easily obscure the connection between the terms in the past and
29
Jouni-Matti Kuukkonen also notes the contradiction related to the identity of the concept in the historical
contexts. If it is not equal to word or term, then our analytical construction of concept might cause the same
distortion that Skinner tries to avoid, even if we derive its name from a relevant historical context (Kuukkonen,
‘Making Sense of Conceptual Change’, History and Theory, 47 (2008), pp. 358-61).
30
Quentin Skinner, ‘A Reply to y Critics’, in James Tully (ed.) Meaning and Context. Quentin Skinner and His
Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 236.
31
Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 66-67. For
an overview of criticism of Skinner’s ‘ahistoricism’, mainly referring to The Foundations, see also Cary J.
Nederman, ‘Quentin Skinner’s State: Historical Method and Traditions of Discourse’, Canadian Journal of
Political Science, 18:2 (1985), p. 340, who nonetheless, argues that Skinner is fully consistent in his method.
32
Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Theory After Enlightenment’, in Joan W. Scott and Debra (eds) Schools of
Thought. Twenty Years of Interpretative Social Science (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2001), p. 22.
6
eventually lapse into historical absurdity, of which Skinner himself warned. 33 A mere
correspondence of vocabularies between historical epochs in itself does not mean we share
the same conceptual apparatus. The same words might, in fact, express very different
concepts, and this discrepancy must be controlled and mitigated by other means. In order to
avoid such ‘presentism’ one would need to pretend that the language to be analysed is
completely unknown, or considerably strange to a researcher, like a foreign language never
learnt before, which nonetheless manifests a number of regularities even for non-native
speakers. This would be an ideally, but also naively, historicized approach, similar to that of
empiricist historians, which, however, raises doubts about the possibility of formulating
research questions that can be understandable to contemporary audiences and reaching
beyond ‘antiquarian interests.’
Kari Palonen recently suggested a remedy to this problem in the form of the necessary
distinction that a research design should include: ‘analytical categories’ of the researcher’s
narrative should be distinguished from the ‘historical concepts’ enshrined in the material;
such categories should not be used if they are themselves part of the historical conceptual
apparatus used in the sources.34 Such a distinction certainly helps to preclude unacceptable
relativism and points to the construction of interpretative categories for a particular analytical
account of the sources. These categories are not only different from the lexicon of sources,
but they are also used in a different manner and for a different purpose. Nonetheless, unless
the perspectivist nature of such research is constantly recognised, analytical categories cannot
but uphold the status of historical concepts as ‘untouchable’ and immune from politicization,
even if these categories are employed for the tactical reasons of research.
Thus, what seems to remain unresolved in Skinnerian contextualism is the tension
between philosophy and history, the meaning of the concept and its particular historical and
terminological expressions. The necessity to construct a concept out of historical instances
involves taking a position on its identity. In other words, it means stating what it is and,
hence, stepping onto the turf of defining its meaning. Skinner’s refusal to fix meaning beyond
the dimension of action, that is, outside the relationship between the speech-act and the
criteria of application of a concept, thus, for some, contributes to the ambiguity of the
33
Skinner, Visions Vol. I, pp. 158-160.
Kari Palonen, ‘Reinhart Koselleck on Translation, Anachronism and Conceptual Change’, in Martin J. Burke
and Melvin Richter (eds) Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought (Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 2012), pp. 83-5.
34
7
achieved results in writing the history of a concept.35 Certainly, part of this complicated
relationship between the meaning and use of concepts is due to Skinner’s reliance in his early
methodological work on speech-act theory as developed by Austin. And, in fact, most critics
limit their analysis of Skinner’s contextualism to his powerful interventions into
methodological debates of the 1960-1970s.36 However, as Palonen points out, this linguistic
theory of speech-acts gave way to an emphasis on the instruments derived from classical
rhetoric (e.g. of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian) and marked a rhetorical turn in Skinner’s
writing. This did not mean only a change in emphases on various schemes of conceptual
change, but also signalled Skinner’s dropping of the idea of ‘standard meaning’ or ‘accepted
denotations’ of concepts that can either be followed or manipulated. 37 Instead, he adopts the
assumption that there is ‘a degree of ‘neighbourliness’ […] between apparently conflicting
evaluative terms’,38 which prevents any serious discussion of the correct understanding of the
concept. Hence, the rhetorical redescription of concepts promised to do away with the
ambiguous relation to meaning. However, as I argue in the next section, the problems with
meaning, definition of concepts and, thus, ‘presentism’ remain part and parcel of Skinner’s
recent ‘rhetorical’ studies.
The rhetorical turn
The role of rhetoric in political analysis is not entirely new to the field of international studies.
Previous attempts to employ rhetorical analysis drew largely on the Habermasian approach to
communicative action, persuasion, internalization of values and formation of mutual
understanding.39 In contrast to the contextualism discussed above, these attempts employ very
problematic notions of shared meaning and attribute a degree of causality to ideas. Even those
sociological approaches in IR that conceive of ‘rhetorical action’ as central to their
explanation of how social norms can be shaped by means of rhetoric (i.e. Frank
One of the confusions might consist of what Bartelson calls a ‘reductionist’ position towards concepts, i.e. the
reduction of concepts to utterances or statements, which loses sight of the concepts themselves. Thus, talking
about concepts, while emphasizing the primacy of utterances, does not always help us to understand the concept.
Thus, Bartelson proposes an alternative approach that derives from the idea of conceptual autonomy. See Jens
Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 21.
36
The same sometimes is true of his followers. See, for instance, Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The
Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2009), pp.7-8.
37
Palonen, Quentin Skinner, p. 163.
38
Skinner, Visions Vol. I, p. 182.
39
Thomas Risse, ‘‘‘Let’s Argue!’’: Communicative Action in World Politics’, International Organization, 54:1
(2000), pp. 1–39.
35
8
Schimmelfennig’s study of the EU’s expansion), thereby displaying a degree of affinity with
Skinner’s approach and diverging from Habermasian communicative action, mysteriously
provide little room for the analysis of rhetoric and the recognition of amenability of values to
rhetorical redescription. For them, rhetoric appears simply as window dressing that furthers
actors’ material gains.40
Skinner’s approach offers an alternative understanding of rhetoric and rhetorical
action, which is central to the analysis of conceptual change and linguistic action and is more
rigorously safeguarded from anachronistic and analytical fallacies. In this approach speech
and action are not causally related, but are understood as the same phenomenon. Thus, as Bell
notes, instead of accounting for the motives and rationale that particular agents may hold for
their action, this approach directs our attention to the ways in which agents manipulate the
application of concepts, simultaneously expanding or limiting the space for an intelligible and
(il)legitimate action.41 Thus, such a linguistic perspective on disciplinary history is not only
an effective means for a project of self-critique,42 but also a fruitful way to highlight the
analysis of conceptual change as a primary task for case-studies in diplomatic history43 and as
a mode of political theorising in general.44
As I intimated above, this type of rhetorical approach is not immune to the ‘presentist’
bias that smuggles the issue of meaning into the discussion, contrary to Skinner’s constant
emphasis on the dimension of action. As Skinner explains, his approach to rhetorical analysis
builds on the tools and figures of classical rhetoric and for him conceptual change is often
synonymous with successful rhetorical redescription. In Reason and Rhetoric in the
Philosophy of Hobbes, he discusses paradiastole as the key rhetorical figure that captures the
essence of rhetorical redescription, that is, ‘a figure by means of which similar things are
Frank Schimmelfennig, ‘The Community Trap: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action, and the Eastern
Enlargement of the European Union’, International Organization, 55:1 (2001), pp. 63-66. The ‘rationalist’
critics of communicative and rhetorical action approaches similarly neglect this dimension of rhetoric, see
Christian Grobe, ‘The Power of Words: Argumentative Persuasion in International Negotiations’, European
Journal of International Relations, 16:1 (2010), pp. 5–29.
41
This understanding renders any action ideological and, as critics argue, implies a degree of essentialism while
complicating the task of understanding a statement as an abstract philosophical statement (Robert Lamb,
‘Quentin Skinner’s Revised Historical Contextualism: A Critique’, History of the Human Sciences 22:3 (2009),
pp. 66-68.
42
Bell, ‘Language, Legitimacy’, pp. 327–350.
43
Evgeny Roshchin, ‘Supplanting Love, Accepting Friendship: A History of Russian Diplomatic Concepts’,
Redescriptions, 13 (2009), pp. 125-46.
44
Kari Palonen, ‘The History of Concepts as a Style of Political Theorizing: Quentin Skinner’s and Reinhart
Koselleck’s Subversion of Normative Theory’, European Journal of Political Theory, I:1 (2002), pp. 91-106.
40
9
distinguished from each other’.45 Skinner further explicates this technique of rhetorical
redescription: ‘Rather than speaking of substituting one word for another, verbum pro verbo,
we ought therefore to speak of substituting one thing for another, res pro re.’ Thus, the task,
or the political action, of the ‘innovating ideologist’ consists in replacing ‘whatever
descriptions our opponents may have offered with a different set of terms that serve to
describe the action with no less plausibility, but place it at the same time in a different moral
light’.46
Skinner also expresses a commitment to the language of historical sources for the
purpose of reconstructing an argument. While reflecting on his method in The Foundations,
he concludes that ‘nowadays I would see it as a sacred duty, when attempting to reproduce the
contents of an argument, to make use of the exact terminology employed by the protagonists
themselves. To fail to do so is inevitably to supply them with distinctions they did not
make’.47 The political action is thus expressed in the vocabulary protagonists use, and the
style and circumstances in which they do so.48 The task of extracting a neutral definition of
terms or a meaning independent from the context of debate would be an illusion.49
However, the analysis of rhetorical redescription as an explanation of conceptual
change and commitment to nominalism do not always work hand in hand, because such
research requires taking a detached stand and attempting analytical abstraction from the
speech-acts of the sources. The requirement is dictated by the constantly recurring problem of
a concept of the concept. Skinner’s understanding of the concept is primarily about the range
of reference or circumstances in which the term can be applied. Thus, the concept captures a
sort of empirical situation or a case that includes linguistic and social action. But this situation
does not reveal itself to a researcher; instead, it is the researcher who has to isolate a situation
by devising criteria for doing so. Admittedly, one can envisage ideal situations, such as the
list of offences included in a criminal code. In this case, the terms are grouped into sets that
constitute cases/concepts by authority of a law-giving institution. In the situation of debate
such authority would be derived from the grammar of a specific language and the practiced
45
Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996, repr. 2004), pp.150-1.
46
Ibid., p. 145; see also Quentin Skinner, ‘Paradiastole: Redescribing the Vices as Virtues’, in Sylvia Adamson
et al. (eds) Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 163.
47
Quentin Skinner, ‘Surveying the Foundations’, in Annabel Brett et al. (eds) Rethinking the Foundations of
Modern Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 247.
48
Such commitment to context-bound vocabulary provides grounds to consider Skinner a ‘nominalist’, see
Palonen, Quentin Skinner, pp. 36-7.
49
Quentin Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 117 (2002), p. 265.
10
rhetorical conventions, which is much less unequivocal than in the case of law. In this
situation there is an inherent ambiguity about the belonging of specific terms to a particular
case/concept. This ambiguity is increased as a result of manipulation of terms by their users
and the original overlap of the sets, which may include more than one term from the situation
in question and thus results in similar, but not identical, concepts (the situation recognized by
Skinner with the help of the concept of ‘neighbourliness’).
This means a very fluid and dynamic linguistic situation, in which concepts
intermingle and, thus, can be effectively changed and redescribed by the interested parties.
Indeed, it is the condition for the deployment of the ‘rhetorical’ approach. However, such
fluidity requires a procedure of double isolation or taking stand on the identity of the object of
study. Firstly, as stated above, comes the need to isolate the situation historically and
thematically, which implies that a researcher chooses a perspective on the object. Secondly,
the researcher must identify the constitutive terms of the chosen situation, which includes at
the minimum their explicit naming and also possibly their designation, and relevant family
resemblances. Thus, if we are to undertake the analysis of conceptual change in res pro re
style, then we cannot but establish the identity of particular ‘res’ involved in the redescription
before continuing with a claim that it was replaced with something else. Therefore, the
procedure of double isolation should be considered as a possibility for a ‘presentist’ bias and
the fixation of meaning determined by a detached position of a researcher whose agenda is
inevitably driven by presentist concerns. Hence, the choice of specific terms for scrutiny, i.e.
‘state’, would always remain questionable.
In fact, despite the declared primacy in the turn to rhetoric of the sources and speechacts contained therein, Skinner steps onto this shaky turf by defining the meaning of the
objects of his research. For instance, sometimes he tries to clarify for the readers that the
terms he is discussing do or do not describe something: ‘this is not to say that the word state
was the one most commonly employed to describe the form of union underlying civil
government’50 or take another example from the same piece: ‘to speak of a city or state, in
other words, is to refer to a community of people who are subject to sovereign power’.51 The
function of describing and referring in these instances is not so different from defining.
Neither is the idea of the meaning of concept totally absent from his writing, e.g. he may
50
51
Quentin Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of the Modern State’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 162 (2009), p. 327.
Ibid., p. 328.
11
speak of ‘the same concept’52 or the fact of ‘possessing a concept’53 when discussing the
range of application of this concept. The possibility of admitting ‘presentist’ anachronism,
generated by the tension between meaning/identity and use, apparently demands more
rigorous means of control than what has been practiced so far. I argue that the risks stemming
from the problematic relation of the past to the present asserted in the turn to rhetoric can be
effectively mitigated by means of the perspectivist and genealogical orientations in Skinner’s
recent work. Firstly, the understanding of objectivity that Skinner borrows from Max Weber54
recognizes the inherent perspectivist nature of any conceptual reconstruction and the
contingency of our ‘truth’ statements. This in a sense unveils the pretence of timeless
metalanguage and ‘suprahistorical vantage point’ that critics, such as Bartelson, see in
Skinner’s approach. Secondly, the relativism that can possibly be engendered by the albeit
limited privilege of historical sources and the arbitrariness seemingly present in the selection
of historical episodes can be rationalized after further elaboration of genealogical approach.
The genealogical turn
There are certainly many heterogeneous directions in which genealogical studies developed in
recent decades in political theory and IR mainly under the influence of Michel Foucault. 55 My
task here is to explore how Skinner’s stated goal of using genealogy fits into this field and can
in fact profit by way of clarifying and specifying its methodological injunctions. Skinner’s
use of the term ‘genealogy’ to identify his own research is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Curiously, the term was still missing in the influential 1989 and 2002 essays on the state,56 in
which Skinner formulated his task as ‘to sketch the historical circumstances out of which
these linguistic and conceptual transformations arose’.57 Once the term entered into the
Quentin Skinner, ‘Rhetoric and Conceptual Change’, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 3 (1999), p. 71.
Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, p. 261.
54
Skinner, ‘Rhetoric and Conceptual Change’, p. 62.
55
See, for instance, such classical works as David Campbell, Writing Security: US Foreign Policy and the
Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A
Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Richard Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997). For a recent overview of genealogy and genealogical
research in IR see Srdjan Vucetic, ‘Genealogy as a Research Tool in International Relations’, Review of
International Studies, 37:3 (2011), pp. 1295-1312.
56
Quentin Skinner, ‘The State’, in Terrence Ball et al. (eds) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 90-131; Quentin Skinner, ‘From the State of Princes to the
Person of the State’, in Visions of Politics Vol. 2: Renaissance Virtues (New York: Cambridge University Press
2002), pp. 368-413.
57
Skinner, ‘From the State of Princes’, p. 369.
52
53
12
formulation of his research agenda, it produced some confusion regarding the task of
genealogy and the role of the meaning of concepts in this analysis.
The way Skinner understands genealogy as a rhetorical redescription derives from the
Nietzschean premise that concepts that have history are in principle undefinable. Their
meaning is always contested and is nothing more than armour in the past and present-day
battles.58 From this perspective, the historicity of concepts parallels the views of the classical
rhetoricians on the contingency of normative concepts which excludes the possibility of any
correct meaning of terms and emphasizes the ‘neighbourliness’ of the forms of social action
that can be described by them.59 It is this insight that helps Skinner to identify the deployment
of the rhetorical technique of paradiastole in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality: ‘it is
Nietzsche’s contention, in short, that the slave morality of the Christians succeeded in
overturning the moral world of antiquity by rhetorically redescribing a number of vices as
their neighbouring virtues’.60
Thus, a genealogical investigation of rhetorical redescription by its nature should
uncover neglected and sidelined concepts. And by virtue of contrasting the perspectives of
losers and winners in historical battle it should stimulate critical reflection on the present state
of the winners. As Skinner puts it, ‘intellectual historians can hope to provide their readers
with information relevant to the making of judgements about their current values and beliefs,
and then leave them to ruminate’. In this way, Skinner hopes to do away with the antiquarian
image of the critical historical exercise.61 As Melissa Lane observed recently, these can be
summarised as two central contributions of Skinner’s approach, namely ‘falsifiability’ and
‘fruits’ (freedom being the third contribution). In her interpretation, falsifiability in Skinner’s
work stands for revealed contestations of our political arrangements and thus challenges the
claim of necessity, while ‘fruits’ contribution consists in recovering ‘buried treasures’ and
showing their relevance for our concerns.62
The question always is whether we can indeed prompt the reader to ruminate or, in
other words, render genealogy effective. This question has an important implication. It is
Skinner, ‘Surveying the Foundations’, p. 244.
Skinner, ‘Rhetoric and Conceptual Change’, p. 67.
60
Ibid., p. 70.
61
Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 118-9.
62
Melissa Lane, ‘Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves: On Quentin Skinner’s Genealogical Turn’, Journal of
the History of Ideas 73:1 (2012), pp. 73-74. I disagree, however, with Lane’s claim that these two contributions
are stronger than the establishment of contingency, because any credible attempt to show that things could have
been otherwise, i.e. contingent, necessarily shows how they actually were or could have been so. From this
perspective, establishing contingency in fact subsumes the two identified contributions.
58
59
13
about the chances of the audience hearing the message and connecting it to the problems that
are of immediate relevance. Some observers indeed believe that Skinner’s studies have direct
relevance to contemporary politics precisely by bringing his readers to ruminate.63 However,
the expectation that one’s potential audience starts immediately to ruminate is often farfetched, because, firstly, when we uncover a neglected perspective on a concept, it is not
always apparent who would be the addressee of the presented finding given the multiplicity
and heterogeneity of disciplines and accompanying scholarly and political debates.64
Secondly, it is not evident how to engage the existing perspectives: if we admit the historicity
and contested nature of the uncovered concepts, the same should hold true concerning the
concepts of today.
It is, perhaps, tempting to stabilize the meaning or conventionality of application of a
concept in the present in order to mesmerize the audience by the radical difference of the
recovered perspective from the past. But such coherence of the present is hardly achievable.
Therefore, a fair strategy would consist in subjecting the present-day debate to the same
rhetorical and conceptual scrutiny as the sources of the past and demonstrating in which way
a particular neglected perspective from the seventeenth century should be more relevant to the
current contestation than another from the late nineteenth century, and how exactly it can
shape current modes of argumentation and competing interpretations of concepts. 65 Thus,
only by sharing in rumination with relevant audiences can we hope to overcome the
antiquarian prejudice against the history of concepts as a perspectivist enterprise that still
exists in political theory, and in IR in particular.
Partly, these problems are due to Skinner’s ambivalence about the task and nature of
genealogy per se. Genealogy is not the same as paradiastolic redescription, but at the same
time Skinner does not seem to develop it as an alternative or supplementary method. As he
admits in his reply to Lane, he found the concept helpful in tracing ‘contested uses of
Holly Hamilton-Bleakly, ‘Linguistic Philosophy and The Foundations’, in Brett and Tully (eds), Rethinking
the Foundations, p. 32; see also Skinner’s own interventions into contemporary debate as a way of helping his
readers to ruminate in Skinner, ‘Political Theory’, pp. 15-24; Quentin Skinner, ‘States and the Freedom of
Citizens’, in Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth (eds) States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge:
Cambridge Uiversity Press, 2003), pp. 11-27.
64
As Lane, following Mark Bevir, points out, genealogy will have no ‘debunking effect’ for those who do not
uphold the beliefs in question as natural. Lane, ‘Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves’, p. 80; Mark Bevir,
‘What is Genealogy?’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008), p. 272.
65
Roshchin, ‘(Un)Natural and Contractual International Society’, pp. 258-262; Skinner, ‘States and the Freedom
of Citizens’, pp. 11-27.
63
14
evaluative terms’ and portray them as ‘a descending family tree’.66 The same conclusion
about the nature of the employed concept follows from the vocabulary in which it is
expressed. In Skinner’s own formulation we can ‘trace’, ‘investigate’, ‘unfold’ and ‘discover’
genealogy of concepts, while such verbs as ‘doing’ or ‘practicing’, which could facilitate the
understanding of genealogy as a method or methodological tool, are avoided.67 The image of
genealogical tree certainly prompts a researcher to build a narrative that shows the complex
development of the concept from the bottom of the tree to the top (which, of course, is not the
same as writing a ‘Whiggish’ history). But this picture remains rather a metaphor, which at
best can only stimulate investigation. This is one of the reasons why the task of discovery in
his genealogy remains confusing as to its epistemological status, for it is not clear whether
such a finding is pre-programmed, as in the relation of a branch to a tree or an embranchment,
or whether the result of research is held open-ended and contingent upon unexpected ruptures
and discontinuities as Nietzschean thought would suggest.
Despite the reservations about the image of genealogy, I argue that Skinner’s
rhetorical genealogy remains Nietzschean. Pace Lane, who maintains that as opposed to mere
contingency Nietzschean genealogy is about contestation and debunking, 68 I see these goals
implemented in Skinner’s genealogical project, even if in a version different from what is
expected by Lane. Skinner links the explanation of genealogy to Nietzsche: ‘we should
proceed genealogically, that’s to say trying to see how the concept developed in our
culture’.69 This development is never teleological or uniform. He emphasises that such
genealogy is about contending uses of the concept and the belief that there has never been any
agreed, natural or essential meaning of the concept under investigation.70 For him ‘to trace
the genealogy of the state is to discover that the concept has been the subject of continuous
contestation and debate’.71 Therefore, the concepts can only be understood as inalienable
elements of endless rhetorical/scholarly/political contestation and in themselves are objects of
contestation. The primary significance in this process is attached to the condition of battle.
Quentin Skinner, ‘On the Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns: A Reply to My Critics’, Journal of the
History of Ideas 73:1 (2012), p. 129.
67
Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of the Modern State’, pp. 325-6; for similar uses see the 2010 revised version of the
article see Quentin Skinner, ‘The Sovereign State: A Genealogy’, in Hent Kalmo, Quentin Skinner (eds)
Sovereignty in Fragments. The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 26-46.
68
Lane, ‘Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves’, p. 79.
69
Quentin Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of Liberty’, Una’s Lecture (2008-2009), available at the Doreen B. Townsend
Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, website http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/media/quentin-skinnermodern-history-university-cambridge (last accessed on 17/07/13).
70
Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of the Modern State’, pp. 325-6.
71
Ibid., p. 360; italics mine.
66
15
Such understanding of contestation is crucial for the link to the concept ‘will to power’, which
Skinner does not wish to endorse in his approach.72 The will to power might indeed be
interpreted as a feature of a specific historical subject and social process and thus belong to an
area outside of his research programme. However, for the purpose of this article it is sufficient
to invoke a particular instance of this concept from The Genealogy of Morality, where
Nietzsche argues against the idea of objective and ‘pure reason’, to show that it is compatible
with Skinner’s approach: ‘the will to see things differently, is no small discipline and
preparation of the intellect for its coming “objectivity”’. By this he means that ‘the only
knowledge we have is knowledge from a perspective’ (3:12; italics original). From the
perspective of this injunction the identified rhetorical battle over or contestation of ‘freedom’,
for example, by Thomas Hobbes and his republican opponents, would be nothing other but
contestation driven by wills to power.
The ‘debunking’ function of Skinner’s rhetorical genealogy is less obvious and runs
into a problem of the beginning and the ending of such research. Skinner recognizes that
genealogies do not have any clear beginning, nor do they have a clear end. But then he
chooses, so to say, a least arbitrary moment to start his analysis of liberty and that is the work
of Hobbes, because he was first to provide a ‘systematic analysis’ of the ‘liberty of subjects’
and his account appeared to be extremely influential and familiar to modern readership. The
choice of Hobbes’s work as an instance of remarkable discussion of the subject matter is
certainly well grounded in and substantiated by Skinner’s own work on early modern political
thought.73 Nonetheless, to informed audiences, such a choice might already seem preprogrammed in terms of timing and type of scrutinized sources, which in principle might be
compromising the ideal of no clear beginning.
The probability of a pre-determined ‘beginning’ of study in the past is supplemented
with attempts to fix the meaning and the use at an ‘end’, that is in the present, which would
help Skinner’s audience to see the watershed between allegedly prevailing and marginalized
perspectives. Skinner does not provide us with present-day definitions himself; instead he
delegates the job of fixing the meaning in the present to other authorities: ‘this is not to deny
that one particular definition has come to predominate. As handbooks on political theory
regularly point out, there has been a noticeable tendency in recent times to think of the state
Skinner, ‘On the Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns’, p. 129.
See, for instance, Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism; and Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
72
73
16
[…] as nothing more than the name of an established apparatus of government’.74 Despite the
proclaimed unwillingness to establish the meaning of the concepts he studies, it is evident that
Skinner cannot resist the need to isolate the concepts under scrutiny thereby practically
equating ‘the range of reference’ to the notion of meaning.75 Thus, the analysed terms refer to
particular res, which have to be analytically constructed with the help of vocabulary of
sources and a scholar himself. The same analytical technique is manifested in the isolation of
particular ‘theories’ or agents in the period under study, such as ‘the absolutist theory’ and
‘the political anatomists’.76
A presupposition of some sort of meaning attached to the concept of the state in the
present, i.e. at the start of the genealogical study, as the metaphor of genealogical tree
suggests, seems to allow a privileged entry to the history of discourse through the exclusive
focus on the term ‘state’. However, if we assume that the term ‘state’ answered to various
concepts in the selected time span of the study, as Skinner himself admits, and continues to be
a subject of heated contestation, as the Nietzschean genealogy indicates, it is not entirely clear
why the term ‘state’ should be granted such privilege over a possible set of terms (especially,
if words are not equal to concepts, while concepts can be expressed with a number of terms).
Thus, the problems identified in the previous section on rhetorical analysis also
translate into Skinner’s genealogical tracing of the history of concepts. These ambiguities
could have been avoided, if Skinner stipulated his genealogical approach in greater detail. His
primary example of genealogy is derived from Nietzsche and serves chiefly to formulate a
general task of his research, albeit practically working as a metaphor of a genealogical tree. It
is surprising that he largely ignores the methodological discussions of genealogy of the last
two decades that originate from the same intellectual source – Nietzsche, but received a new
powerful impetus from the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s name figures sometimes in
Skinner’s discussion of his methodological orientations, but he seems to associate Foucault
mainly with his early ‘structuralist’ works and overlooks his genealogical studies.77 However,
the exclusive emphasis on Foucault’s archaeology does not give enough credit to the
Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of the Modern State’, p. 326. See a similar statement in the same article: ‘Critics
agreed that, when we talk about the state, we are referring to a type of civic union, a body or society of people
united under government’, ibid., p. 332.
75
For the range of reference of the term ‘state’ see ibid., p. 332.
76
Ibid., pp. 330, 333.
77
See Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (p. 112 fn.19.) for the reference to Foucault’s The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969).
74
17
genealogical injunctions that informed much of his ‘middle period’78 and raises questions
about Skinner’s characterisation of his own work as ‘genealogical’.
This is all the more puzzling given the apparent affinities between certain genealogical
principles in the work of Foucault and Skinner. For instance, Skinner stresses the need for
historians to focus on discontinuities instead of origins.79 Coupled with the idea of no clear
beginning and end of any genealogy, however compromised, it is strikingly similar to
Foucault’s resoluteness to prioritise in historical analysis episodes, ruptures, contingency and
negation of the idea of origin and progress in history, rationality of change and the idea of
history as a permanent battle. The same can be said about ‘pointillist’ history of the one and
history viewed from perspective of localised events and episodes of the other. 80 These
parallels invite one to inquire into the potential of genealogy as practiced by Foucault and his
followers and to address the issues related to presentism and antiquarianism in the
genealogical rhetorical approach adopted by Skinner, were he prepared to endorse the idea of
genealogy fully. By no means does this speculation imply my attempt to reconcile the
approaches of Foucault and Skinner, which would inevitably lapse into construction of
strawmen out of both, producing only a superficial comparison inattentive to the changes in
early and later writings of both thinkers.81 Their research agenda is certainly incongruent in
too many aspects (particularly, in the roles of subject-as-agency and power) to contend that
one could benefit from another. Nor do I believe that a debt to one source of intellectual
inspiration – the Nietzschean interpretation of genealogy – should necessarily result in
adopting similar genealogical strategies.82
See also Skinner, ‘Surveying the Foundations’, p. 243.
Ibid., p. 237.
80
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader: An
Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 76-100; Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and
Power’, in James D. Faubion (ed.) Michel Foucault. Essential Works of Foucault 1954 -1984, Vol. 3 “Power,”
(London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 116; Hubert Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics, Afterword by M. Foucault (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 2 nd ed.); Michael
Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992),
pp. 108-10; Richard Rorty, ‘Foucault and Epistemology’, in David C. Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader
(Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1986, repr. 1994), pp. 41-49; Wendy Brown,
‘Genealogical Politics’, in Jeremy Moss (ed.) The Later Foucault. Politics and Philosophy (London and New
Delhi: Sage, 1998), p. 42.
81
For an example of such ‘reconciliation’ see Ryan Walter, ‘Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the State: The
Primacy of Politics?’, History of the Human Sciences, 21 (2008), pp. 94-114.
82
As has been noted before, Foucault’s understanding of genealogy also diverged from that of Nietzsche. See,
for instance, Jeremy Moss, ‘Introduction: The Later Foucault’, in Moss (ed.) The Later Foucault, pp. 6-8; and
Bevir, ‘What is Genealogy?’, p. 274.
78
79
18
Nevertheless, Foucault’s practice of genealogy, especially in relation to the dimension
of the ‘truth axis’83 and thus thematically close to Skinner’s project of history of concepts,
seems to contain principles that can be employed as tools for rhetorical genealogies and help
us reappraise Skinner’s contribution to the present-day thinking.84 Probably the central idea
here is the vector of relation that genealogy establishes between history and the present.
Perspectivism and the task of setting the audiences to ruminate that Skinner derives from the
work of Nietzsche and Weber share much with the task of genealogy as an inquiry into the
history of the present to produce ‘problematizations’. As such genealogy does not simply dig
up past objects and put them on display; rather it proceeds from the identification of the
problem in the present and traces the lines of its transformations in history. 85 The thrust of
such an exercise is not to construct what intellectual historians would call a ‘Whiggish
history’, but to demonstrate that history is written in a way as to render the present
meaningful or problematic. This, in fact, is a way to stimulate critical reflection on our
modern understanding that Skinner expects his genealogical research to achieve.86
Thus, the power struggle over the present and its polemical definition cannot but
discriminate against past transformations and knowledge that can potentially destabilize it, the
discovery of which is the key task of genealogy.87 In this sense, the tasks of Foucault’s and
Skinner’s genealogies are similar, if not identical. However, in Foucault’s work genealogy
preserves a more explicit and solid link to present-day social practice thereby offering a clear
contribution to the ongoing debate. This genealogy takes a largely retrospective vector by
unfolding problematic phenomena back in time through a series of often non-linear and
disconnected transformations88 or, in Skinner’s terms, ‘pointillist’ changes that exclude the
idea of charting long-term conceptual change and development. Looking from this
perspective on Skinner’s use of genealogy and the correspondence between his goals with the
Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogical project, it is evident that the proclaimed aim of
Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, p. 103.
A laudable example of research building on a combination of Foucault’s and Skinner’s methodological
orientations, although omitting the discussed issue of presentism, is Shane P. Mulligan, ‘The Uses of Legitimacy
in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34:2 (2005), pp.349-375.
85
David C. Hoy, ‘Introduction’, in Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader, pp. 6-7; David C. Hoy, ‘Foucault and
Critical Theory’, in Moss (ed.) The Later Foucault, pp. 24-6; Moss, ‘Introduction: The Later Foucault’, pp. 7-8.
86
Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of the Modern State’, p. 325.
87
The critical effect of genealogy, which consists in its ability to change the conception of phenomenon it
investigates, is what gives it a name of ‘effective history’, see Martin Saar, ‘Understanding Genealogy: History,
Power and the Self’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008), p. 298.
88
Michel Foucault, ‘Questions of Method’, in Faubion (ed.) Michel Foucault, p. 224. For a comprehensive
methodological reading of the Foucauldian genealogy see Vucetic, ‘Genealogy as a Research Tool’, pp. 12981304.
83
84
19
critical reflection/rumination can also be the aim of ‘debunking’ certain beliefs and concepts,
which are used as armour in contemporary political and rhetorical battles. If we remained
committed to the principles of no definite beginning and no pre-determined findings, then
neither Skinnerian nor any other version of Nietzschean genealogy should be concerned with
identifying the necessarily converse evaluative narrative to those beliefs it aims to question or
change. This is one of the possible outcomes on par with its other legitimate and productive
effects, such as recovering lost perspectives on a subject that may not undermine its overall
identity. Thus, the effects of genealogical research can, and will often be, limited in scope (i.e.
only specific audiences, phenomena and concepts within a broader contestation are targeted)
and scale (i.e. debunking might consist in complete reversal normative narrative or in a more
‘modest’ transformation or unsettling of a concept).
Furthermore, as such a history of the present this genealogy remains ‘presentist’
insofar as it is sees history as a product of power struggle and polemical construction of the
present, not as a teleological progression.89 In other words, the professed perspectivism
should be applied more consistently in dealing with historical sources. It means the
perspective of a historian/political theorist90 needs to be assigned epistemological primacy as
long as we do not seek to recover a ‘real’ history91 and vindicate a radical relativism by
assigning primacy to the language of our sources. It is a truism to maintain that sources do not
speak for themselves, thus, it is our job to take a stand on the identity of the objects of
analysis simultaneously resisting the idea of writing a teleological or ‘Whiggish’ history and
trying to identify the points of change and rupture that may unveil the forsaken perspectives
of the losers in power struggles.92
The voice of these latter perspectives will inevitably be mediated by the present and
thrown into the heat of specific current theoretical/political debates.93 Thus, the recurring
need to identify particular res in Skinner’s studies from this genealogical perspective would
no longer look problematic, since it should start with identification of specific res in the
present, their problematizations and contestations, and, thus, be consistent in adhering to this
principle in the context of past sources. Such a genealogical perspective would also be
Hoy, ‘Introduction’, in Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader, pp. 11-4.
For the explication of objectivity in terms of perspectivism see Max Weber, ‘The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge
in Social Science and Social Policy’, in Sam Whimster (ed.) The Essential Weber: A Reader (London and New
York: Routledge, 2004), p. 374.
91
This is the aim of John G. Gunnell’s The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American
Vocation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
92
See Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, pp. 116-9.
93
For a similar proposal see Palonen, ‘Reinhart Koselleck on Translation’, p. 80.
89
90
20
suspicious of any pre-determined choices of historical periods because the problematization
of particular phenomena, concepts and practices cannot have a universal rationality and,
hence, history.
Conclusion
Despite all the possible methodological traps and pitfalls that Skinner’s approach may
contain, it can still offer useful and rigorous tools to analyse conceptual change in terms of
rhetorical re-description and thus contribute to political theory and IR by explicating
disciplinary history, as well as case studies of diplomatic and political rhetoric. 94 As no
approach in social science should remain or, indeed, does remain immune to continuous
questioning and further shaping as a result of its empirical application or theoretical reflection
over its fundamental premises, so could the approach advocated by Skinner benefit from a
firmer commitment to its pronounced genealogy. In many ways, Skinner’s epistemological
injunctions and his understanding of history and commitment to perspectivism are already
genealogical. However, further steps in this direction are needed in order to make this project
matter for wider political theory and IR audiences. Such a step requires effective engagement
with the current debates and the retrospective reorientation of genealogy. This would help in
tackling the problems of presentism and the status of the mediated recovery of forsaken
perspectives.
In terms of research strategy, the ‘perspectivist’ link to the present can engage into
current debates by the necessary mapping of the present-day contestation of a concept as its
point of departure. It would then depart by unfolding contemporary debates back in history,
thus contributing to a history of the present. Such unfolding through the system of explicit
references to contemporaneous and past conventions and contexts may further help us in
identifying the locations in which the link to the present loosens to the point of breakage,
while elucidating the transformation of vocabularies involved in conceptual transformation.
Thus, controlling the flow and identity of vocabulary (i.e. in the form of copying, borrowing
and adapting the modes of application) would be a crucial element in such retrospective
genealogical research. Of course, the flow is not an uninterrupted retrospective progression,
See, for instance, Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Rhetoric and the Role of Ridicule’, in Kari Palonen et al. (eds)
The Ashgate Research Companion to The Politics of Democratization in Europe: Concepts and Histories
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 137-49.
94
21
but rather a pointillist trajectory, in which the changes in points are best understood through
the lenses of rhetorical redescription and contextual analysis.
Such reorientation of genealogical approach to rhetorical conceptual change also
responds to those concerned with the presence of self-identified, or misidentified, intellectual
traditions, which is one of the key issues with the Skinnerian approach in IR, i.e. the
discipline that revolves largely around the idea of great debates, schools and traditions. The
genealogical rhetorical approach can finally start accounting for IR traditions by establishing
them as rhetorical constructs and practice. Indeed, presenting a case as a tradition, which
arranges a history of thought on a specific issue in a linear and possibly intelligible order, can
in itself qualify for being a rhetorical strategy.95 Such a strategy may consist in intentional or
unintentional misinterpretation of texts, misrepresentation of authors, the omission of
inconvenient facts and details and, necessarily, simplification. Not only this interpretation
sheds new light on the construction of intellectual ‘origins’ of, let’s say, liberal or realist
tradition of thought, it also helps us understand the presentation of alternative explanations
and counterfactuals by the representatives of competing camps as necessarily a rhetorical and
perspectivist exercise.
The rhetorical genealogical reorientation would also have implications for the existing
Skinnerian IR studies. For example, Keene’s International Political Thought as explicitly
seeking to do the Skinnerian history of concepts,96 could have also dealt with a possibility of
presentism more consistently. This could have been done by systematically recognizing the
author’s role in constructing the identity of specific concepts in every chapter and the
corresponding presentist constraints in such construction, instead of affirming an
alternative/new perspective on the subject. The relation to the present in Keene’s work only
deepens the impression of antiquarianism, as he mainly seeks to establish contrasts with
contemporary views and achieve better understanding of the past.97 Apart from identifying
aspects of classical thought that contemporary literature neglects,98 the approach advocated in
this article would have expected such works to show how exactly a recovered perspective
engages contemporary contested views and which arguments in the existing debate it debunks
95
Markus Kornprobst similarly suggested to interpret IR debates from the perspective of rhetoric, see his
‘International Relations as Rhetorical Discipline: Toward (Re-) Newing Horizons’, International Studies Review,
11 (2009), pp. 87–108; however, the genealogical rhetorical approach of this article cannot hope to produce
synergetic knowledge by way of dialogue, which is the aim of Kornprobst’s contribution.
96
Keene (2005), p. 23.
97
Ibid., pp. 17-19.
98
Ibid., pp. 21-5.
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by undermining the foundations of their legitimacy or by offering new factors/variables they
cannot account for.
23