PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
To Namier it had seemed obvious that political theories act as the merest ex post facto rationalisations of political behaviour. If we are looking fo… - Quentin Skinner
" "To Namier it had seemed obvious that political theories act as the merest ex post facto rationalisations of political behaviour. If we are looking for explanations of political action, he maintained, we must seek them at the level of ‘the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality’. For critics of Namier such as Sir Herbert Butterfield, the only possible retort seemed to be to go back to a famous dictum of Lord Acton’s to the effect that ideas are often the causes rather than the effects of public events. But this response duly incurred the scorn of Namier and his followers for the alleged naiveté of supposing that political actions are ever genuinely motivated by the principles used to rationalise them.
English
Collect this quote
About Quentin Skinner
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner (born 26 November 1940) is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London and an influential intellectual historian.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner
•
Quentin R. D. Skinner
•
Q. R. D. Skinner
•
Q R D Skinner
•
Quentin R D Skinner
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Quentin Skinner
If this is nothing more than a stipulation about how we ought to use the term ‘ideological’, then perhaps it will do no harm. But if it is a proposal about how historians ought to set about the business of explaining beliefs, then it seems to me fatal for just the reasons I have sought to give. It refuses to recognise that one of the reasons why someone may hold a certain belief is that there is good evidence in favour of it, that it fits well with their other beliefs, and so on – in a word, that it is rational for them to hold it. If we refuse to speak in these terms, we deprive ourselves of an indispensable means of identifying the most appropriate lines of enquiry to follow in any given case.
The lack of freedom suffered by those who advise the powerful may of course be due to coercion or force. But the slavish behavior typical of such counselors may equally well be due to their basic condition of dependence and their understanding of what their clientage demands of them. As soon as they begin to ‘slide into a blind dependence upon one who has wealth and power’, they begin to desire ‘only to know his will’, and eventually ‘care not what injustice they do, if they may be rewarded’.
I am convinced, in short, that the importance of truth for the kind of historical enquiries I am considering has been much exaggerated. I take this to be a product of the fact that so much of the meta-historical discussion has hinged around the analysis of scientific beliefs. In such cases the question of truth may perhaps be of some interest. But in most of the cases investigated by historians of ideas, the suggestion that we need to consider the truth of the beliefs under examination is, I think, likely to strike the historian as strange.
Loading...