intellectual history and the history of political thought

Abstract

R. G. Collingwood’s description of the difference between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of an event had profound implications for historians of political thought in the 1960s, when it played a role in inspiring the articulation of the approach to intellectual history that has come to be known as that of ‘the Cambridge School’.2 Collingwood’s choice of the example of Ceasar’s death at the hands of assassins seeking to save the republic was fortuitous, in so far as the work of those associated with the Cambridge School has heavily contributed to a remarkable upsurge of interest in republicanism as an historical tradition of political argument.3 Much has been written about this development since the publication of John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment in 1975 and Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought in 1978; with the recent appearance of reassessments of historical republicanism by these authors, a re-evaluation of the subject is timely.