Abstract:

The renowned British historian Quentin Skinner is significant in the contemporary world of thought. His scholarship is best known for his two-volume book, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, in which he studies prominent European thinkers of the Renaissance and Reformation periods and examines how their writings shaped modern politics and society. Since his early days, Skinner has actively explored innovations in historical theory and method while studying the history of political thought. Several of his essays published in the 1960s and 1970s reflect this path of thinking and its evolution. Skinner holds a critical stance against the positivist tradition of modern historiography. Drawing on the work of linguistic philosophers such as J. L. Austin, he explores how the “illocutionary act” implied by language and ideas needs to be understood by reading contemporary writings and understanding the linguistic conventions of the time. Skinner’s research helps promote a “linguistic turn” in academies of the time, but he is not a poststructuralist nor a postmodernist. While making a distinctive contribution to historical theory and methodology as “philosophy in history”, Skinner’s scholarship remains within the “Eurocentric” tradition and has not interacted actively with the general trend in post-WWII historiography.

Key words: Quentin Skinner, historical theory, linguistic turn, J. L. Austin, Richard Rorty, Hayden White, historical context, illocutionary force