Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric

‘Kari Palonen’s impressive knowledge of twentieth-century European historiography creates an appropriately broad canvas for this fine study of the Cambridge contextual historian Quentin Skinner as a political theorist in the grand tradition. Palonen shows to what degree Skinner’s projects belong to the world post Nietzsche and post Wittgenstein, which give priority to “life” and the “lived experience” over theory and scholastic history (or historicism). For the modern homo politicus no longer speaks “ for eternity”, but as a person of his/her own time. It is in this very special sense that context and text belong together: as the ground, and perhaps the only ground, against which human actions now have meaning’. Patricia Springborg, University of Sydney