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v 1.5 mk » Liberty before Liberalism « Michael Krax 2 avril 2003 Pensée politique et sciences sociales (Mme Lefranc) fiche de lecture Liberty before Liberalism Quentin Skinner est historien. Quand il se charge de nous expliquer la Liberté avant le libéralisme, sa préoccupation principale n'est donc pas celle du philosophe (politique) telle que serait celle d'Isaiah Berlin, pour en donner un exemple, mais celle de l'historien des idées politico-philosophiques. Il favorise une approche répandue sous le nom de Cambridge School qui ne vise pas l'enseignement de la philosophie politique et l'instruction philosophique à partir des textes dits canoniques (comme le proposait Raymond Aron), mais la restitution du contexte historique dans lequel l'auteur a conçu son oeuvre. Cette approche qu'il qualifie d'archéologique (l'allusion au titre de livre de Michel Foucault n'est pas faite par hasard, dit il p. 112) implique que l'historien doit regarder à côté des textes « classiques » et chercher ceux qui n'étaient pas retenus par les acteurs politiques et scientifiques.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org..Wiley-Blackwell and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History and Theory.My aim is to consider what I take to be the basic question which necessarily arises whenever an historian of ideas' confronts a work which he hopes to understand. Such an historian may have focused his attention on a work of literaturea poem, a play, a novelor on a work of philosophysome exercise in ethical, political, religious, or other such mode of thought. But the basic question will in all such cases remain the same: what are the appropriate procedures to adopt in the attempt to arrive at an understanding of the work? There are of course two currently orthodox (though conflicting) answers to this question, both of which seem to command a wide acceptance. The first (which is perhaps being increasingly adopted by historians of ideas) insists that it is the context "of religious, political, and economic factors" which determines the meaning of any given text, and so must provide "the ultimate framework" for any attempt to understand it. The other orthodoxy, however, (still perhaps the most generally accepted) insists on the autonomy of the text itself as the sole necessary key to its own meaning, and so dismisses any attempt to reconstitute the "total context" as "gratuitous, and worse."My concern in what follows will be to consider these two orthodoxies in turn, and to argue that both in effect share the same basic inadequacy: 3.

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