Conversation and Political Thought

Abstract

authors of past political texts. What does this mean? Many historians of political thought imagined themselves to be engaged in a dialogue with political thinkers and considered it to be their imperative duty to expose the incoherencies in pernicious and dangerous doctrines. The pedigree of this predilection is long established and needs no further illustration here. This ahistorical enterprise reflected the Machiavellian predisposition to converse with the ancients. This tendency toward conversation implicitly postulated the idea that texts can be brought to life in the present world of the historian and made to contribute, if not directly, then incidentally, to pertinent and pressing problems. Revisionist historians of political thought-I have in mind Skinner, Pocock, Dunn, and their followers-pronounced the conversational technique to be spurious on the grounds of anachronism and because it broke the bounds of the proper limits of historical enquiry.' It suffices to point out here that the revisionists, as I understand it, wanted to change the relationship between the historian and the texts. Instead of the texts forming part of the present world of the historian, the historian has to intrude himself into the then present world of the texts. Instead of the conversation being conducted in terms dictated by the historian, the authors of the texts, and, more broadly, the linguistic conventions which constrained their thoughts are to set the conditions of the conversation. Understanding a text, the revisionists believe, is similar, perhaps even identical, to understanding the meaning of discourse in a dialogical context. The historian makes an imaginative leap back to a past where he becomes privy to the conversations of others. However, the historian is not an interlocutor in the dialogue, nor a participant in the sense that he contributes to the substantive details. The historian in this respect appears to have a different role, and that is as a custodian of the then current meaning of what was said. Nevertheless, although the historian does not contribute to the conversation, he imagines himself to be a spectator who