History of political thought
Intellectual history has only relatively recently acquired disciplinary respectability, having been characterized during the period of dominance of first political and then economic and social history as being the study of ideas which were either irrelevant to the exercise of power or secondary to fundamental economic forces. Those ideas which were considered worthy of study tended to be political ideas, and so the history of political thought was the area of intellectual history most likely to be recognised in the decades following the Second World War. The work of the likes of Quentin Skinner in this field, who sought to study political texts not in abstraction but by recreating the intellectual context in which they were produced, proved to be applicable not just to the history of political ideas but in the renaissance of intellectual history in general.
- Historians:
- Berlin, Isaiah
Pocock, John Greville Agard
Skinner, Quentin - Themes:
- Intellectual history
