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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
‘For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.’ Peter Laslett's remark of 1956 is well known. His lament was echoed in 1962 in Bernard Crick's extended plea In defence of politics. They surveyed a wasteland laid bare by a sociology which announced the exhaustion of political ideals, and a philosophy, logical positivism, which declared that nothing significant could be said about ethics or politics. According to Laslett, one of the original culprits of the former kind was Karl Mannheim, because he had taught that all thinking and all knowing were sociologically determined.
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2 The relevant literature is conveniently listed in Mulligan, L., Richards, J. and Graham, K., ‘Intentions and conventions: a critique of Quentin Skinner's method for the study of the history of ideas’, Political Studies, XXVII (1979), 84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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10 By way of illustration, I hope it is not gratuitous to record that in 1976 an article of mine, subsequently appearing in this journal (xx (1977), 569–86), was rejected by another journal on the ground that, though ‘fully worthy of publication’, it was ‘a purely internalist piece on the history of political theory’.
11 Skinner, Q., ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’, History and Theory, VIII (1969), 49.Google Scholar
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