The Cambridge School can broadly be characterised as a historicist or contextualist mode of interpretation, placing primary emphasis on the historical conditions and the intellectual context of the discourse of a given historical era, and opposing the perceived anachronism of conventional methods of interpretation, which it believes often distort the significance of texts and ideas by reading them in terms of distinctively modern understandings of social and political life.
In these terms, the Cambridge School is 'idealist' in the sense that it accepts ideas as constitutive elements of human history in themselves, and hence contradicts social-scientific positivism in historiography.
[3] Here, Skinner attacks what he describes as two "orthodoxies": "perennialism", the view that philosophers have always debated the same fundamental questions; and the notion that context is irrelevant to a historical understanding of texts, which can be read as self-standing material.
[4] In Mark Bevir's words, Skinner and his colleagues "defended the history of political theory against both reductionists who dismissed ideas as mere epiphenomena and canonical theorists who approached texts as timeless philosophical works".
Pocock had already candidly argued in a 1958 essay (published in 1962) that, despite paralleling an Oakeshottian commentary on the unavoidable influences of past society on human utterances, much of the burgeoning contextualist methodology derived from the teachings and efforts of Peter Laslett.
Pocock mentioned Michael Oakeshott in a concluding passage of the 1965 article, "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century."
"[10] On a related note, in his 2019 response to the Cambridge School article, Pocock further alluded to his 1975 The Machiavellian Moment as a " 'Cambridge' treatise [authored] in an American setting (suggested by Bernard Bailyn and Caroline Robbins)."
He thought it "clear that I am not supposing a state of things in which each idiom or paradigm defines a community of persons who speak in its terms and whose thinking is governed by its presuppositions."
Conversely, scholars that "concern themselves with a history of contexts and texts...set up a synchronically existing language-world in order to see how it was being used at the moment and how it was being changed in the short run."
Pocock disclosed that the opprobrium had precipitated his multivolume Barbarism and Religion series, published from 1999 to 2015, on historiography drafted during the Enlightenment and its benefaction to the history of political thought.
The collection became the inaugural volume of the publisher's Ideas in Context series, with an editorial board that included Quentin Skinner, Richard Rorty, and J.
Only months after the resignation, however, Payton authored a New York Times article calling for increased fundraising, mergers, and partnerships with "business" in order to maintain and expand scholarly endeavors as well as institutions.
The foundation continues to sponsor the book series, while Cambridge University Press promotes sustainability and energy saving in academic publishing.
The editorial introduction to the special issue acknowledged that the "Cambridge School's shaping themes [were] reflected in many of the monographs in 'Ideas in Context'---a focus on the history of political thought, concern with the career of republicanism and its various ideological challengers, a tendency to study secular political ideas in isolation from religion, preoccupation with early modern Europe and a predilection for a canon of Western European and English authors situated within a thick contextual web of arguments, languages, and texts."
But soon after publication of The Language of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe "the series rapidly expanded to embrace broader chronologies, themes, domains of intellectual endeavor, and territories."
"[26] Christopher Celenza added that the "Ideas in Context" series included "field-defining synthetic works by senior scholars (Peter Novick's That Noble Dream and Dorothy Ross's The Origins of American Social Science); innovative studies that quickly became canonical (David Armitage's The Ideological Origins of the British Empire); books by renowned scholars setting out on a new, trail-blazing path (G.E.R.
Lloyd's Adversaries and Authorities); volumes that arose out of conferences or lecture series (Philosophy in History); collections of essays around a single important theme (Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed.