Questions: Quentin Skinner and Linguistic Contextualism

Question 1

A student asks: 'What does Hobbes's Leviathan tell us about the proper limits of state authority today?' How would a Skinnerian contextualist respond to this question?

• A. Positively — Leviathan's arguments about sovereignty are timeless and directly applicable to modern political debates
• B. The question is malformed: Hobbes was addressing specific controversies about religious authority and sovereignty in 1651, not writing for future debates. We must first ask what illocutionary act Hobbes was performing in that context before asking what his text 'tells us today'
• C. Negatively — historical texts cannot speak to modern questions because language changes too much
• D. It depends on whether Hobbes's arguments can be verified empirically against modern political science data

Answer: (B)

Skinner's contextualism treats the question 'what does this text tell us today?' as potentially anachronistic. It imposes present concerns onto a text written in response to specific historical controversies. The first task is to recover what Hobbes was doing — what position he was arguing against, what moves were available in the linguistic context of 1651, what illocutionary act he was performing. Only after that can we consider how (or whether) his arguments translate to different contexts.

Question 2

Why does Skinner insist on reading the pamphlet literature, sermons, and legal documents surrounding a major text like Leviathan, rather than focusing on the canonical text itself?

• A. Because the canonical texts are often poorly written and the surrounding literature contains clearer arguments
• B. To establish the linguistic context — the available concepts, contested terms, and rhetorical moves that made Hobbes's arguments intelligible and controversial to his contemporaries
• C. To find evidence that contradicts the canonical text's claims
• D. Because Cambridge School methodology requires comprehensive source coverage regardless of relevance

Answer: (B)

Skinner needs the surrounding literature to reconstruct the linguistic context — to know what could be said in that time and place, what was conventional and what was transgressive, what positions Hobbes was arguing against, and what conventions made his arguments intelligible. Without this, the historian risks imposing a modern reading on terms that meant something specific in Hobbes's polemical situation. The pamphlet literature is the evidence for what was 'in the air' linguistically and politically.

Question 3

Skinner's contextualism implies that historical texts like Machiavelli's Prince have very little to teach modern readers because they were written for audiences in different historical circumstances.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Skinner does not argue that historical texts are irrelevant to modern readers — he argues that we must first understand what they were doing before extracting lessons. In fact, his method often reveals texts to be richer and stranger than perennialist readings suggest. Recovering the original illocutionary context can make a text more instructive, not less, by showing that its apparent meaning conceals a more specific and surprising argument. The goal is historically accurate understanding, which can then inform (though not directly determine) contemporary thought.

Question 4

Perennialism in intellectual history means treating historical texts as addressing eternal questions about human nature that remain relevant regardless of historical context.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Perennialism is exactly this view — that great texts engage timeless questions (justice, sovereignty, freedom) that recur across all human societies, making them directly readable as contributions to ongoing debates. Skinner objects that this effaces the historical specificity of each text. The questions Hobbes addressed were not eternal concerns but specific controversies — about the English Civil War, the claims of religious authority, the basis of political obligation in a context of failed sovereign authority. Treating them as perennial flattens this particularity.

Question 5

What does Skinner mean by asking 'what was the author doing with these words?' rather than 'what did the author mean?' and why does this shift in question matter for historical interpretation?

Model answer: Skinner's question focuses on the illocutionary act — the social action performed by the text in its context. Authors argue, advise, mock, legitimate, challenge, or praise; they respond to opponents and work within rhetorical conventions. Asking 'what did the author mean?' risks treating the text as a deposit of ideas to be decoded, whereas asking 'what were they doing?' recovers the text as a purposive intervention in a specific situation. This matters because the same words can perform different acts in different contexts, and understanding the act requires knowing the context, not just the semantic content of the sentences.

This shift from meaning to action is borrowed from speech act theory (Austin, Searle). It reframes the historian's task from semantic analysis (parsing what propositions the text contains) to pragmatic analysis (recovering the performative dimension — what the text was doing as an intervention). The practical difference is that it forces historians into the archives to reconstruct context, rather than just reading the text in isolation.