Since the late 1960s Quentin Skinner has defended a highly influential form of linguistic contextualism for the history of ideas, originally devised in opposition to established methodological orthodoxies like the `great text' tradition and a mainly Marxist epiphenomenalism. In 2002, he published Regarding Method, a collection of his revised methodological essays that provides a uniquely systematic expression of his contextualist philosophy of history. Skinner's most arresting theoretical contention in that work remains his well-known claim that past works of political theory cannot be read as contributions to `perennial' debates but must instead be understood as particularistic, ideological speech acts. In this article I argue that he fails to justify these claims and that there is actually nothing wrong at all with (where appropriate) treating past works of political theory as engaged in perennial philosophical debates. Not only do Skinner's arguments not support the form of contextualism he defends, their flaws are actually akin to those he identified in his critique of previous methodological orthodoxies.

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IntroductionThere have been few more influential figures in the Anglophone study of political thought in recent years than Quentin Skinner. Among the many features that characterised his energetic initial writings-in the late 1960s and early 1970s-was his comfort in writing both as a historian of philosophy and as a philosopher of history. As well as offering path-breaking interpretations of the intellectual context of seventeenth century writers like Hobbes, Skinner also offered a distinct, often controversial, methodological programme rooted in claims about the nature of historical understanding. His unique strand of linguistic contextualism-which he suggested was indebted to Collingwood, Wittgenstein and Austin-has undeniably had a transformative effect on how intellectual historians conceive of their craft. In the early 1980s, he began to speak in another scholarly voice: that of political theorist, as he engaged in a project of 'excavating' and defending a neo-classical understanding of human liberty, which, he argued, was popular among early-modern republicans but then usurped by a modern liberal alternative. 2His excavation of republican liberty-and the fusion of historical enquiry and abstract philosophical analysis it involves-has continued to dominate his recent work