More History of Theory

I know I did a bad job of reporting Ian Hunter’s paper last time, but hey, if you took a look at the paper he spoke from you’d know why. Ouch my head hurt. So perhaps tomorrow’s will be a little closer to my level… I can live in hope:

Title: ‘Historiographical Revisionism, “Cambridge School” intellectual history and the very idea of a theoretical moment’

Presenter: Professor Conal Condren, Scientia Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales

Date: Thursday, 25th August 2005
Time: 4-6pm
Venue: James Birrell Room at the UQ Staff & Graduates Club

Abstract:
From the 1960s, two distinct but inter-related trends in historiography established themselves in counterpoint to theoretically informed orthodoxies. English revisionist historiography gradually marginalised visions of the English Civil Wars or Revolution that had been construed through liberal Whig and or Marxist theories of historical development. Superficially this was, and was seen to be, a victory for anti-theory over theoretical modelling. At roughly the same time that this revisionism was assuming an academic ascendency, what has since been called ‘Cambridge School’ intellectual history began in the rejection of a tradition of political theory and the virtual equation of intellectual history with the history of philosophy. Although this involved specific theoretical manifestoes, it was anti-theory in the sense of being hostile to philosophic reductionism in historiography.

This paper explores the consanguinity, overlap and differences between these increasingly self-conscious forms of ‘revisionism’, not least in so far as each in its way was a theoretical moment and each exhibits some similarities with the theoretical moments of what is so easily bracketed as continental philosophy and social theory.

What this means for the very idea of a theoretical moment, for the instability of intellectual contexts, for the difference that hovers at the margins, for the lamentable reality of academic time-lag and the value of academic amnesia will be touched on by way of conclusion.

Bio: Conal Condren is Scientia Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales. His current research focuses on oath taking and office holding in early modern Britain, and the persona of the philosopher in early modern Europe. His key publications include: The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, its Inheritance and on The History of Ideas, (Princeton University Press, 1985); George Lawson’s Politica and the English Revolution, (Cambridge University Press, 1989, 2002); The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, (Macmillan, 1994); Satire, Lies and Politics: The Case of Dr Arbuthnot, (Macmillan, 1997); Thomas Hobbes (Twayne, 2002); The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, edited with A D Cousins, (Scholar Press, 1990); and Politica Sacra et Civilis, (George Lawson, 1660 & 1689), Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, (Cambridge University Press, 1992, 2002).